What does a Director of Knowledge Management for a legal firm do?

This month there were two "Director of KM" jobs advertised on linked-in.  Let's see what this job entails.

Word cloud from the responsibilities list

"Knowledge Management" is a poorly defined term, and Knowledge Management jobs can range from low level data-entry clerks to high level strategic posts, and anything in between. 

However when you see "Director of Knowledge Management" vacancies, that tells you that this is a high level post. One of these advertised vacancies gives few details of the post, but the second, from CMS (the legal firm) gives a full list of responsibilities and characteristics. 

These are listed below.

Responsibilities

• Conceiving, developing and implementing the firm’s knowledge management strategy. Promotion of a knowledge sharing culture. 
• Acting as an ambassador and figurehead for knowledge in the firm. 
• Working with the Head of Knowledge to drive continual Knowledge Management  service improvement, including the evaluation and exploitation of new technologies and resolving issues and barriers impacting on Knowledge Management  service delivery. 
• Developing a cross firm knowledge community through facilitating communication and coordination between PSLs, information officers, Legal Project Managers, Business Managers, IT and others. 
• Working with Practice Group Leaders to ensure appropriate provision of Knowledge to the practice groups. 
• Working with the HR and L&D functions to ensure alignment of professional learning and Knowledge Management offerings. 
• Working with the Marketing and Business Development function to build a client facing knowledge offering. 

Qualifications and characteristics

• Prior experience of being a qualified lawyer prior to entering into a KM role. 
• A minimum of 7 years’ KM experience operating at a senior level. 
• A naturally confident leader and strategic thinker able to assess the firm’s future needs and align KM initiatives accordingly. 
• An interest in, and knowledge of, technological advances and their potential impact on knowledge systems. 
• A creative and commercial thinker who will come forward with new ideas and approaches. 
• An ability to motivate and persuade lawyers to contribute knowledge and learning assets. 
• A consultative approach – the ability to communicate effectively on both a practical and academic level with a willingness to listen. 
• Experience of operating internationally and prepared to travel. 
• Experience of creating and implementing new programmes and policies within a budgetary and time-critical framework. 
• Advanced managerial skills with the ability to negotiate with and persuade others, not in direct line of report and working in close partnership with internal clients. 
• Excellent communication skills with fluency in English, both written and spoken. Additional language skills would be an advantage. 
• Ability to operate under pressure to resolve issues in a controlled and calm fashion 
• Ability to operate and succeed in a fast-paced, highly intellectual, multi-tasking, client-service orientated environment. 
• A team player with a 'can-do' attitude and a passion for excellence.

The responsibilities here are pretty generic, and not restricted to the legal sector. A Director of KM in any organisation would do much of this activity. However being a legal firm they are looking for a lawyer to take this role. 

Should KM change the culture, or work with the culture?

If the culture of your organisation makes Knowledge Management difficult, what do you do? Seek to change the culture?  Or work your way around the different cultural elements?

Change Alley sign by Matt Brown on Flickr

I was reading a book about legal KM at the weekend, and the author (quite rightly) identified the hourly billing culture of many law firms as being inimical to Knowledge Management, largely because it drives individualism through setting personal targets. The author frequently asserted that "Knowledge Management needs a collaborative culture to be successful" and therefore that the billing model should change.

There is a risk here.

The risk is that we may see culture change as a way to support Knowledge Management, rather than a way to support the business.  This is the wrong way round. KM must put the business first, and changing an entrenched culture to support KM may be the wrong thing to do; at least in the short term.

Let's look at the legal "hourly rate" model. This has evolved over time and is still the prevalent billing model in the legal market (although this may be changing). It is reasonably logical, it can be reasonably transparent, and it allows legal firms to derive revenue in conditions of great uncertainty, such as litigation. Sure it incentivises the individual, but it ensures the revenue for the firm while reducing risk.  Anything that challenges the hourly billing model will probably not survive very long in many law firms.

Let's assume this model will be here to stay for a while yet. The question then becomes, not how KM can change the billing culture in order to make KM easier, but how KM can work within the billing culture for the benefit of the firm?

Traditionally, legal KM has done just this. By using non-fee-earning lawyers to act as a supply chain of legal knowledge for the front-line fee earners, thus freeing up fee-earning time for the top lawyers. However there may be other ways to work within the model, for example by reducing the time spent on non-fee-earning activities.

Take Business Development, for example. This non-billable activity is crucial to the future of the firm, and requires lawyers to do non-legal activities, such as client development, pitching and billing. When Ernst and Young (who also billed by the hour) were investigating KM in the 90s, they focused their pilot efforts on the time it took to create and close a bid, and through reusing knowledge were able to cut this time by a huge percentage.  Other law firms could use KM to learn about customers, clients, business segments and key individuals as a way to increase business development success rates.

Take Marketing, as another example. In a recent Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics article, “I Didn't Go to Law School to Become a Sales Person—the Development of Marketing in Law Firms,” consultant Sylvia Hodges writes, “Traditionally, lawyers believed that their knowledge and expertise spoke for itself, and it would be a sign of defeat to start marketing.” (source). That attitude is changing, and law firms need to develop their knowledge of effective marketing (an area which KM already addresses in many consumer goods companies).

These are just two examples where Knowledge Management can show its worth in the legal sector, above and beyond the traditional model of PSLs creating precedent libraries, without attacking the hourly billing model.

If you, too, face an entrenched culture which is unfriendly to Knowledge Management, perhaps you should think not how to change the culture, but how to work within it for long enough that you can prove the value of KM, and show the way to a culture which supports the business better.

KM branding from Shell Legal

This is a nice example of KM branding from the legal department in Shell.

Branding and a good elevator pitch are important elements in Knowledge Management Implementation.

This story was presented by Lara Nicholls, Shell International’s Legal Global Know How Counsel, at the KM Legal conference earlier this year.

Lara supports more than 1,000 Shell legal professionals in 46 countries around the world, in all aspects of knowledge management.

She brands her inititive "TAN" - a Korean word meaning "To chat, to share, to grow", and an Acronym for Traning And Knowledge. The corresponding logo is shown here.

Lara's KM Elevator pitch is as follows -

"Each year, individually, we are one year wiser and collectively Global Legal is 1,000 years wiser. If, through the right culture and effective tools and resources, we can each tap into just a small portion of those years, imagine what we can achieve?"

How mature is your industry sector in KM terms?

How mature is Knowledge Management as an applied discipline, and how does this vary with industry sector? (We have already seen how it varies by geography).

This was one of the areas we explored with our global Knowledge Management survey this year. 
Maturity was measured in two ways - an estimate of the number of years that KM had been a focus, and a verbal description of maturity of KM within the organisation, with 5 descriptors

• We are investigating KM but not yet started
• We are in the early stages of introducing KM
• We are well in progress with KM
• KM is embedded in the way we work
• We have tried KM and given up

The diagram on the right above shows the results for the verbal assessment.
Not all industry sectors are shown on this diagram, as for some the number of data points was too small to be significant.

We can see that Knowledge Management is most mature in Construction and Engineering, Professional Services, Oil and Gas, and the Military.  The percentage of organisations that have given up on KM clusters netier at the not nor the bottom of the picture, and seems unrelated to maturity.

The second diagram on the right shows the average number of years that the respondents from each sector said their organisation had been doing KM.

Generally the organisations that were rated as more mature in KM terms are also those who have been doing KM the longest, such as Oil and Gas, Military, and Professional Services.

The most noteworthy outlier is Legal Services - the sector with the longest history in KM, but in position 6 (out of 13) in terms of described maturity level.  Also Construction and Engineering, which was rated the most mature, but is 5th in the "average number of years" list. 

The 5 core skillsets for a KM team

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Our Knowledge Management Survey continues to throw up fascinating data. It seems that, if we look at Knowledge Management programs world-wide, there are 5 core skillsets people look for in a KM team, although the emphasis varies from one sector to another. 

We provided respondents with seven options for skillsets, and asked them to prioritise them in terms of importance to their Knowledge Management team. The average priority for each skill is shown in the table below, with large numbers being High Priority (marks out of 7), and the frequency in which each was chosen as Highest Priority is shown in the picture above.

From the table, we see that 5 of the 7 skills have almost exactly the average weighting, and statistically we can see these as "equally important". The other two are much lower.

The same 5 are all popular "first choice" skills, with  "Organisation and Industry skills" and "IM and library skills" being the most popular.

These are the average figures. When we look at individual industries, we see some systematic differences, although all 5 skills are well represented in each indutry.

• Industry skills are strongly favoured by Legal firms (where most KM teams are made up of lawyers and paralegals) with IM/Library skills being a close second, also by the Military
• IM/library skills are favoured by Professional services firms, with Change Management skills a very close second
• Facilitation skills are slightly favoured by Oil and Gas, and by Manufacturing
• Change Management skills are favoured by Construction and Engineering, and by the government sector. 
• IT skills are favoured by Telecoms companies

Based on the data from the survey, I think we can look at these 5 skills as being the core skillsets needed within any KM team (tweet this)
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What do KM professionals actually do?

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The Word Cloud shown below is derived from linked-in job descriptions of 40 people with "knowledge Management in their job title, as an attempt to analyse the way KMers describe their job. 

It's an interesting plot, but becomes even more interesting when we contrast those KMers from legal firms, with those who aren't. 

Total word cloud

First, the main cloud, shown above. I created this by choosing at random 40 of my linked-in connections who had "knowledge management" in their job title, and who gave a detailed description of their main tasks or activities. 

20 of these people were from legal firms, 20 were not. All were from the UK and US.  

I copied their current job description, and pasted the aggregated text into tagcrowd.com.  The words which are displayed in the plot above are those which were most commonly used (excluding prepositions etc), and the size of the word is proportional to the number of times it appeared. 

So what does this tell us?

• Obviously, knowledge is at the heart of the job, and management as well.
• Business, Development, Strategy, Systems and Support are common words, reflecting the common need to support the business, and develop KM strategies and systems
• Management is a more frequently used word than Sharing (although this may be because I chose people with a "Knowledge Management" title and not a "Knowledge Sharing" title
• Information is a prominent word - we still have this blurring of confusion between information and knowledge
• Practice/processes and technology appear - so two of the 4 table-legs of KM are present. As we know, governance and roles are frequently ignored.
• It's good to see Collaboration and Communities in there, also learning and experience.

Now let's compare clouds for the people who work in legal KM, and those who don't.

Word cloud for legal KM job descriptions

Non-legal word cloud

There are a number of words that appear in the legal word cloud but not in the non-legal cloud. 

• Firm, 
• Intranet, 
• Law, 
• Legal, 
• Library, 
• Records, 
• Research, 
• SharePoint

Here's some of the words that appear in the non-legal word cloud but not in the legal cloud

• Change, 
• Engineering, 
• Experience, 
• Improving, 
• Learning, 
• Network, 
• Organisational, 
• People, 
• Social

There are still a lot of words that appear in both clouds, but you can see two distinct flavours of KM here. Legal KM has a greater focus on records management, use of SharePoint, library techniques, and research (the word Content is also much bigger in the legal cloud). 

Non-legal KM has a greater focus on continuously improving, on organisational learning from experience, and from networking people into social communities (the word Communities is also bigger in the non-legal cloud).

The legal KM flavour is largely driven by the nature of the legal business, and the focus on specialist product, but there is still room for some of the non-legal KM components to begin to be developed in the legal sphere as well. 

KM in two legal departments - a comparison and lessons

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In the late 1990s Schlumberger and BP - two oil-industry giants -  launched Knowledge Management programs in their legal departments, hoping to transform the “lone ranger” culture of both organizations. 

law library books by Janet Lindenmuth on Flickr

 In a 2003 paper in KM review, my colleagues Vince Polley, Walt Palen and I summarised the approaches taken by the two companies, and drew out some lessons, which I summarise here.

Overall, both organizations took a technology-led portal-focused approach, with varying degrees of success. Schlumberger technology was the LawHub, BPs portal was lexpertise.

Technology alone did not provide the answer in either case, and both organizations made the mistake of over-complicating the software. High-level support was important in both cases.

Schlumberger differed from BP in developing a structure of practice groups to provide content management and local ownership, and had this structure been more aligned with the needs of the business, it could have been a powerful mechanism for promoting knowledge sharing.

The two approaches are summarised in the table below

	Schlumberger	BP
Getting started	Pilot began in 1997 with management support and two enthusiastic champions.	Started KM after company-wide efforts began because it took time to gain leadership support. Turning point was visit to the Schlumberger legal team.
Initial challenges	Employees were technologically proficient, but biggest challenge was culture of independence.	Merger with Amoco meant lawyers needed to work collaboratively. Launched portal and document management technology first, and intended to introduce knowledge sharing culture later.
Technology	Wanted to make LawHub a one-stop shop for its legal function. Results have been mixed.	BP's Lexpertise is a portal, a knowledge base and as a collaboration space.
Motivation	Reward is through recognition of collaboration although in 2000 the performance review was changed to reward contributions to LawHub.	Some of the legal teams had a salary component a team in Houston committed to a “post one, retrieve one” system. However no systematic incentive was rolled out.

Initiative launch

Schlumberger’s well-planned LawHub launch succeeded very well. BP’s “launch by e-mail” approach, without formal user training, was not as successful.

Schlumberger launched LawHub worldwide in December 1999. Designers believed junior lawyers would be the most active content users, and senior lawyers would be the most likely content contributors. Shculmberger held a series of eleven “live fire” exercises – one for each of the practice groups – to encourage buy-in from both groups. In each exercise, a simulated problem, such as “provide a best-practice Letter of Intent for use in Scotland,” was posed to small teams of junior lawyers, working in breakout rooms with live access to the LawHub. Senior lawyers had already populated the LawHub with relevant, responsive content, and they participated in the exercises as observers.)

The exercises were a terrific success. In one breakout group, a mid-level lawyer with eight years of experience and who had been recognized as a highflier, said, “If I had known this material was here three weeks ago, it would have saved me four days work.” The senior lawyers were taken aback by the enthusiasm, particularly from people like the highly-respected junior lawyer.

BP’s Lexpertise had two launches to progressively larger groups, then launched to the entire legal community in August 2001.

BP had intended to introduce Lexpertise at a worldwide legal conference in Budapest; unfortunately this conference was cancelled during a round of cost cutting. Instead, it was rolled out through e-mail, including a context-setting video recorded by BP’s chief counsel. All lawyers in the BP group were sent this email, and told that they had been enrolled into Lexpertise.

While the initial intention had been to provide training, an unintended and perhaps mistaken feeling developed that “this is so simple they will not need to be trained.” This wasn’t the case, and the lack of an accompanying training package delayed users getting up to speed, and also meant that users skill sets varied widely at any given time). Training was eventually provided either through Microsoft Netmeeting or by local champions at each of the main legal offices.

Lessons from the two implementations

• Focusing on technology can be dangerous, but ignoring it can be fatal. 
• Culture is key, especially where the key aptitudes for KM (e.g. team based structure and explicit performance measurement) are weak, difficult to employ, or simply lacking. Both BP and Schlumberger have terrific technological solutions and highly adept employees. Nevertheless they were only just beginning to develop a knowledge-sharing culture more than two years after deployment
• Keep the technology simple for users who are not technologists, such as lawyers. 
• Success requires support from the highest levels in the company. 
• Burn some bridges. Part of Schlumberger’s success in making the LawHub a daily tool came from discarding e-mail bulletin boards and distributing all department announcements through threaded discussion. The LawHub became the only place to go for departmental management issues. 
• Align the knowledge sharing with company structures. BP was somewhat successful, but the Schlumberger practice groups were not aligned with the business units, and business managers saw involvement in the practice groups as not directly related to “real work.”

A legal KM role description.

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Lawyer fortune cookie by sigckgc on Flickr

Here is another addition to our collection of Knowledge management role descriptions (find more here).

Found on Linked-In - a role description for a Legal KM role, the "KM Lawyer". Although, like in most Legal KM approaches, there is a strong focus on model forms and precedents, we also see the introduction of post-matter review and lessons learned (highlighted below). This is a welcome extension of the traditional curation-focused legal approach.

The Labor & Employment Knowledge Management Lawyer (“KM Lawyer”) will be an experienced lawyer reporting directly to the Knowledge Management Office

Specific reponsibilities include, but are not limited to:

Knowledge Strategy

• Work with the Groups and the Knowledge Management Officer to assess the relevant knowledge needs, define and implement a plan to meet those needs, and establish mechanisms for regular review of the plan.

Organizing and Sharing Knowledge

• Work with members from the Groups to create and capture practice-related knowledge content and encourage the sharing of information and knowledge generally;
• Operate and implement procedures for capturing, filtering, storing, accessing and disseminating materials and information, including model forms and precedents;
• Co-ordinate and support the lawyers to ensure that all models and forms are updated to reflect changes in applicable laws, regulations, market standards and best practices; and
• Ensure seamless accessibility of information and precedents via the appropriate practice portals.

 Lawyer Training and Technical Expertise

• Identify practice-related training needs and coordinate with the Professional Development team to organize, design and deliver (personally or with others) training, including seminars, workshops and offsite training;
• Train on how to access knowledge resources in the practice portals, on the Intranet, and elsewhere;
• Provide direct support to individual practitioners to assist them with locating practice-related internal and external knowledge resources; and
• Be a source of legal, market and practical expertise.

Legal Project Management

• Work with the lawyers, Knowledge Management Officer and other stakeholders to establish legal project management processes to capture matter information at all stages of an engagement and conduct post-matter review of lessons learned.

 Client-Facing Initiatives and Business Development

• Work with the Business Development department staff to identify opportunities to develop business from new and existing clients through articles, briefing notes, client training, etc.; and
• Help to identify issues and developments of relevance to key clients as part of ongoing business development.

 Current Awareness and Thought Leadership 

• Monitor and keep the Groups informed about important developments in applicable statutes, regulations, judicial decisions and the business environment through bulletins, training, know-how meetings and other processes;
• Identify trends in the law or business environment and suggest innovative ways to deliver the Firm’s services to clients more efficiently and effectively; and
• Participate in industry events to raise the Firm’s profile as a thought leader and keep up to date with developments when feasible.

 Other

• Participate in the planning of training and other knowledge-related activities;
• Participate in regular meetings with the Knowledge Management Officer and other KM Lawyers to facilitate the sharing of best practices and knowledge; and
• Attend external training and conferences to keep up-to-date with relevant developments in the law, business environment and professional support.

Desired Skills and Experience

• Five or more years of sound legal experience in the labor & employment law context at a large law firm or relevant in-house legal department;
• Prior experience providing knowledge management support would be highly desirable;
• High professional standards with a passion for quality work product;
• Excellent drafting and research skills;
• Well-developed organizational and communication skills;
• Understanding of learning processes and different methods of training;
• Effective interpersonal skills and the ability to interact with people at all levels;
• Aptitude for and interest in technology and integration issues; and
• Pragmatic, self-motivated, flexible and team oriented attitude.

Legal KM, the shift from internal focus to client focus

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I have been reading a very interesting case study from the legal sector, entitled "Value added services – Empty promises or real benefit? Using VAS to benefit clients and the business strategy at DLA Piper", by Chris Green and Megan Jenkins, originally published by Legal Knowledge Management: Insight and Practice, Ark Group/Managing Partner, 2013.

In this paper, Chris and Megan look at how the old legal model of billing by the hour, which drives a very individualist approach to knowledge, is changing. Increasingly firms are looking to deliver cost-effective services and good value, which are driving internal efficiencies and knowledge-sharing.

The services that are developing a role in this are "value added" services, such as free updates, online support and tools, blogs, webinars, and even free advice on small matters.

This drives an evolution in the focus of the in-house KM team. As well as delivering knowledge to the fee-earners (often through delivering precedents and type documents, and supported by the library) their work now increasingly includes delivering knowledge to the client, and linking client teams' awareness of business needs with the services that the KM team offers. Chris and Megan have a central role supporting the traditional PSLs in this client-focused approach, including this -

"Making it as easy as possible for client partners to promote Value Added Services and provide relevant information to clients is vital. We therefore provide client-friendly introductions and pre-prepared email templates to tell clients about frequently used services. 

"Not only is this good KM (making repeat work more efficient), it also makes the delivery of messages consistent. We collect crosspractice area training topics into a list and we assist client teams with packaging this into bespoke training programmes for clients. We also maintain an internal collection of DLA Piper client training materials to make it easier and faster to produce tailored training materials for clients".

This shift from internally-focused KM towards client-focused KM is a profound one for legal firms, and will only serve to deepen the impact of KM in the legal market.

The new future for legal KM

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Thanks to Vince Polly for pointing me to this excellent blog post on the future of legal knowledge management, suggesting that things are changing for KM in the legal field.

For many years, legal KM has been focused primarily on document management, and on providing easy access to the best documentation, be it precedents, boiler-plate text or exemplar agreements. This has been driven by a number of factors;

• a focus on effectiveness rather than efficiency, given the historical practice of billing per day rather than per result
• a conservatism resulting from the CKO and the legal teams generally being lawyers themselves, 
• a pressure to maximise billable hours, leading to a lack of incentives to invest in learning.

As a result, legal KM traditionally focuses on documents, is often run by law librarians and paralegals, and omits much of the "learning from experience" and tacit knowledge exchange which has proved so valuable in other contexts.

The blog post mentioned above suggests things are changing. As new pressures in the legal market place introduce a drive for efficiency, so knowledge management is evolving and expanding as a response. I quote from the blog 

"For the first time in legal history, there is now a true incentive for law firms to deliver results faster, through the right combination of internal and external resources and the better use of IT as a competitive edge....... 

"Many KM professionals today focus on legal project management, alternative pricing arrangements and process improvement. In my view, this reflects more a discontinuity or abrupt shift than evolution. Legal KM sees the light: content is not an end. Even software is only a means to an end. The real end, the real goal, perhaps the Holy Grail, is improving lawyer productivity; is solving real problems....... 

"the Holy Grail of legal knowledge management appears to be within reach – where the goal of KM is to provide true competitive advantage by developing a combination of tools and content to improve lawyer productivity, solve real problems and make the business more profitable".

In response to these changing incentives, we see new Knowledge Management offers emerging, such as the "Law Firm KM" offered by our Canadian franchisee Stephanie Barnes, and the Expert Legal tacit knowledge collection practised by our partner company Tacit Connexions.

Soon I hope we will see the legal firms embracing the principles of learning before, during and after, and introducing communities of practice,  lesson-learning systems, and the other components of a Knowledge Management framework, as they strive to become not just billing organisations, but learning organisations.

Example KM role description - Shell Legal

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Published, here, an example of a Knowledge Management role description.

This role, called the "Global Know-How Counsel", is effectively the Head of KM, or CKO, for the Legal function within Shell. It does not seem to be a Network Leader role, though it could be considered to be a Practice Owner role, given the accountability for content, and given that they are looking for a Lawyer with KM interests, rather than a KMer with a legal background.


Job Description 

Knowledge sharing is a top priority in Shell Legal. It directly underpins our aspiration to be the best corporate legal team in the world by ensuring that our advice reflects our own expertise and experience as well as the latest legal developments and best practice. The Global Know How Counsel will be working in the Legal Director’s Office, reporting into the Legal Director via the Legal Services Coordinator and heading up the Central Knowledge Management Team  (which) supports Shell Legal in 48 countries.

 Role

The role of the Global Know How Counsel is to 

• manage and lead the Central Knowledge Management Team under the supervision of the General Counsel responsible for Knowledge Management and the Legal Services Coordinator. 
• capture the knowledge that is created globally via our internal and external knowledge management networks and to 
• ensure a global consistent approach to knowledge management within Shell Legal, making use of our (IT) tools to communicate and collaborate globally. 

Responsibilities

By delivering the support required, the Knowledge Management Team enables our lawyers, paralegals, Ethics and Compliance SME’s and IP Professionals to provide advice, support and related services to the Businesses in a proactive, timely, cost-effective and professional manner with a view to furthering business objectives and protecting shareholder interests.

The Global Know How Counsel's responsibilities will include, inter alia:

• ·         Informally lead the Knowledge Management Team
• ·         Participate in the internal/external knowledge management networks to ensure a global consistent approach to knowledge management. 
• ·         Create annual plans to further improve knowledge sharing.
• ·         Manage the content in our Knowledge Management System
• ·         Represent the Shell Legal Central Knowledge Management Team internally
• ·         Work closely with Shell Legal’s Global Training Counsel.

KM in law firms - the impact of new billing structures

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Drive Thru LAWYER !
Originally uploaded by brookenovak

Mary Abraham's, in her excellent Legal KM blog, has just delivered a series of posts on new billing structures, and how they will impact the work of the lawyers (see here, here and here).

She concludes, in a report on ILTA’s "Using Technology to Manage Costs, Increase Profitability and Support Billable Hour Alternatives" session, that "bare discounts are going to have a negative effect on a law firm’s profitability unless that firm significantly trims its costs of delivering legal services"

The session, with it's focus on technology, went on to list various technologies which they feel can help cost reduction, including search, blogs, wikis etc.

Now internal cost reduction has been a KM focus for years and years, for very many industries - automotive, oil and gas, manufacturing. Ford, with it's $1.25 billion cost reduction through BPR, BP with it's $260 m in a single year, Chevron with its $2 billion in 7 years, Texas Instruments with its "free fabrication plant"; all focused on internal cost reduction.

KM methods to address these costs have not been purely technological. Simple processes such as After Action reviews, Peer Assists, Quality Circles, communities of practice, Lean manufacturing and the like have been very effective in reducing internal production costs. Shell's Technical Limit process regularly reduces drilling costs by 40%, for example. In each case, technology goes hand in hand with process, with accountability, and with governance - the complete holistic KM model.

Perhaps now is the time to rethink KM in legal firms, focusing not just on technology, but also on process and on roles and accountabilities; focusing not just on improving content to clients, but on radically reducing the cost of the internal workings of the firm as well. This is a time of huge opportunity for the first legal firm that can revolutionise internal process using KM, in the same way that other sectors did a decade ago. It won't be easy - it certainly won't be as simple as buying a better search engine or setting up a wiki - but there is enough history from successful KM implementations that it should be possible to get it right.

The prize will be to become the first legal firm to offer big discounts to its clients, without hurting the profits for its partners.