ILTA White Papers

www.iltanet.org KM experts have been talking about efficiency for years, but now attorneys are listening. business analysts, to lead the way. Still others added KM-related activities and initiatives to the to-do lists of existing resources within IT, accounting, marketing and other areas. Throughout this journey, even the most successful organizations struggled to attract and hold the attention of their most important passengers — attorneys and their clients. Many of us have wrestled with the KM equivalent of defining a loyalty program that ensures those critical passengers enjoy the ride and keep coming back for more. Believe it or not, this might be getting easier given several interesting shifts that I have observed and that appear to be making a real difference. To those whose universe revolves around KM, these ideas won't be ground-breaking news, but, perhaps, these observations will validate that you are on the right path. It's More Than Just Cool Consider this: A journey is declared successful if and only if the travelers reach their intended destinations. Ideally, those travelers are delivered to their destinations of choice in style and comfort, looking forward to repeating the trip in the future. In the past, many KM-related projects identified their destination as a particular piece of technology or a specific process. These were noble efforts to be sure, but they did not go quite far enough to pique the interest of those most valuable passengers, i.e., 20 ILTA White Paper lawyers and clients who will actively participate. Launch announcements would be sent. Training demonstrations would be conducted. For the most part, the audience would nod with approval, thinking "Hey, that's kinda cool." Then, they would head back to their offices to continue doing business as usual. The unprecedented economic pressures of recent years have been both a blessing and a curse when it comes to driving KM efforts forward. On the negative side, many firms were forced to implement dramatic cost-cutting measures. KM investments and resources were some of the first to go, as management might not have seen an obvious, universally recognized connection to the day-to-day core business functions of serving the client. On the bright side, the efficiencies that can result from effective KM initiatives play directly into clients' growing demands to reduce costs while delivering results. KM experts have been talking about efficiency for years, but now attorneys are listening. The emergence of legal project management and alternative fee arrangements has pushed attorneys to think in terms of accurate budgeting, lean staffing and improving efficiency — all areas most preferred to avoid in the past. This pressure to achieve results in a more predictable way, at a lower cost and without "reinventing the wheel" has many attorneys making the leap from a "it's kinda cool" reaction to an "I'm going to make this part of my practice" commitment.

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