Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/68817
www.iltanet.org There is a growing role for KM within a law firm to assist in the firm's approach to outsourcing legal services. What is outsourcing? At its simplest and broadest, outsourcing refers to the situation when an organization contracts with another to perform a function that it previously did itself. In doing this, the intention might be to save money, to get the benefit of specialist expertise, or both. This definition would encompass moving from internally hosted servers to the cloud, as well as transferring all internal IT services to another company. In the knowledge context, there has been a form of outsourcing for over 20 years. The Practical Law Company (PLC) was established in the early 1990s to provide basic standard documents, know-how and current awareness to in-house legal teams and law firms. PLC now covers all the main areas of legal practice and markets its services to law firms as a complement to their PSLs — providing the generic content on top of which law firms can layer their own tailored knowledge. In practice, however, this layering approach does not always work as well as planned. In some practice groups, it is possible for lawyers to refer directly to PLC in preference to their PSL (thereby allowing the PSL to provide a more valuable service elsewhere), but in others this could be problematic. The problems arise because the basis of outsourcing (that there is a basic or specialized service that can be carved out of a workflow) does not always apply in relation to knowledge work, where it is essential to have grappled with the basic material in order to be able to deliver a higher-level response. 62 ILTA White Paper This doesn't mean that the work of developing knowledge within a law firm can never benefit from outsourced support. However, careful assessment of the complete knowledge process needs to be undertaken, and only that which can be carved out and done elsewhere without harming the whole should be considered for outsourcing. The core purpose of a law firm is to apply lawyers' knowledge to produce benefits for clients. If knowledge management activities concentrate on developing the right knowledge for a law firm's clients and the situations they find themselves in, it is difficult to imagine an outsourced service that could meet that need. While outsourcing knowledge activities might not be sustainable, there is a growing role for KM within a law firm to assist in the firm's approach to outsourcing legal services. KM work typically fits somewhere on a continuum between process definition (knowledge capture and reuse related to existing work) and facilitating the creation of new knowledge (innovation by responding to unforeseen problems). A better understanding of a law firm's processes can have a number of benefits. At the very least, better process management within the firm will improve client service. If, however, analysis of the firm's work and processes shows that they could be done more cost-effectively by an outsourced provider, the firm has a choice of responses. The simpler choice would be to enter into an agreement with an outsourcer who would perform those aspects of