ILTA White Papers

Deliver Tangible Value with KM in the New Law Firm the firm's work for clients. The more challenging choice would be to take a strategic decision to exit those areas of work altogether. A firm that fails to examine its processes is likely to miss a competitive opportunity to redefine its business. Firms should not be under any illusion that their clients will not be doing a similar analysis. The Technology An Increasingly Social Environment: One of the reasons why knowledge management became so important to organizations (and law firms are no exception) is that the increased use of technologies such as email and personal computing increased the depth and significance of the silos within which people worked. There were information silos when lawyers worked predominantly with paper, but it was much easier for their colleagues to see inside them (by listening as they dictated or by looking inside the filing cabinet). Now that email messages often sit within personal Outlook folders and documents are typed by lawyers directly into Word, developments like e-filing and document management systems are needed to ensure that junior lawyers can learn from observing the work going on around them, and to allow supervising partners to become aware of things going awry as early as possible. The irony that technology has hidden our work and that it has had to be used to expose it again is compounded by the creation of readily available social software tools. One advance that would have been impossible without the electronic exchange of documents is the ease with which texts can be copied and compared. When lawyers exchanged contracts on paper, it would have been inconceivable for one firm to copy the text of another — to do so would have meant completely retyping the document from scratch. Now it is possible to "borrow" the wording of key clauses or even whole documents simply by cutting and pasting. Law firms potentially face the same crisis of intellectual property theft as the entertainment industry. But few, if any, firms have taken the same line in response. We don't use digital rights management to prevent copying of documents. Instead, law firms use tools like kiiac to analyze their contracts, and those available in public repositories, to learn more about key clauses and to develop the best approach to a client's needs. This is definitely in the client's interests: Why would a client settle for a law firm drawing solely on its own documents and experience when it could use kiiac to see what the consensus is doing (or to spot something novel)? Enhancing Lawyers' Work (and Knowledge, Too): Lawyers need a level of comfort with their knowledge tools, otherwise they won't use them. They would ideally choose their own tools to meet their preferred ways of working. That might be possible, but the firm would be responsible for things like data security and consistency of presentation. So, for example, information about clients and the work done for them would be protected within the firm's financial management and CRM systems, and lawyers could access that data within their chosen apps to create documents and advice for clients — concentrating on content, rather than formatting or presentation. Once the content is right, other systems (or people) can ensure that the presentation is consistent with the firm's standards. This is the approach taken, for example, by the current generation of Web-based document automation systems (such as DealBuilder or Exari), although those still depend entirely on tools provided by the firm. The growth of personal devices — home PCs, then laptops and now smartphones and tablets — has allowed the development of widespread personal social networking software. (This has been a symbiotic process: Personal social software has opened the market for the development of personal devices as well.) Law firms, like many other businesses, are social organizations; their success depends on relationships within and beyond the firm. Lawyers who can effectively connect with each other and with clients inevitably deliver a better service. And yet, many firms have struggled to make the most of the social software revolution. This might be because they focus too much on the social aspect of the tools, rather than the personal benefits that they bring. Consider, for ILTA White Paper 63

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