theAustraliancorporatelawyer
K N O W L E D G E M A N AG E M E N T – M U C H M O R E T H A N P R E C E D E N T S! Full disclosure up front. I don’t write a lot of articles. In fact, since leaving private practice almost a decade ago, I have not written a single article. For me, putting the metaphorical pen to paper feels a bit strange—I’m used to just talking to people. As a result, if it sounds like I am talking to you, rather than writing an article, it is because I am. I hope to make this piece a conversation starter, with lots of questions (and perhaps a few answers).
S
o, to get us started, ask yourself the following—not counting the lawyers themselves (and their impressive brains), what is the most valuable asset your legal team has? Hopefully, if you’ve read the title of this article, you might have guessed or even know the answer—knowledge management (KM). But what is KM, why is it important and, finally, how can we deliver a successful KM strategy?
A bit about KM KM can broadly be defined as the way in which a team, function or organisation captures and shares the knowledge, learnings and experience of its team members. In practical terms, as lawyers, much of our learning happens on the job as we read and think and process information. Traditionally, this knowledge has only been shared on a need to know basis and often verbally. The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium refers to this as tribal knowledge and considers that the overreliance on tribal knowledge “ fails scale as the team grows or changes, forcing costly re-work .” Good KM is about extracting that learning from the lawyer’s brain and ‘institutionalising’ it or capturing it for the team or the organisation so that it can be used by others now and in the future. Some frequently cited examples demonstrating good KM include: • • Regular meetings or knowledge sharing forums, • • Document management systems with strong search capabilities, • • Well-populated intranet site with self-help tools and FAQs, and • • A precedent suite for the organisation’s most frequently used templates.
Why is KM important? In short, good KM is a way of working that saves time, improves outcomes by making it easier to find answers and builds a collaborative and sharing culture. To expand:
Benefits of good KM for the organisation: •• •• ••
Better capture of the organisation’s intellectual capital, The ability to provide consistent legal advice – the team (now and in the future) is ‘playing from the same playbook’, Better use of time and resources – capture what has been done and build on it, rather than re-invent the wheel.
Benefits of good KM for the lawyer: ••
Time savings, by having a trusted and preferred source of truth to go to (rather than starting from the beginning),
30
|
VOLUME 30, ISSUE 4 – SUMMER 2020
•• •• ••
The ability to advise consistently and confidently (knowing what has been advised historically), Better connection with the legal team and the experts in it, Use the time to be more solutions focused, so look good!
One case study I often use to explain the benefits of KM is from the perspective of a new starter. Think about the range of items on your checklist you would step a new starter through: • • The way the team works, • • How you manage matters and external firms, • • How you manage documents and emails, • • What precedents and templates you use, and • • What frameworks you have to measure team targets and performance. Do you have all these materials in a central repository to ensure you cover everything and then leave a pack with the new starter to refer back to? Continuing with the case study, imagine a few weeks in and the new starter is contacted for urgent advice—do they know where to go for previous advice or a relevant, up-todate precedent that could give them the answer they are after quickly and efficiently or do they spend all day researching an answer or playing telephone tiggy with a lawyer on leave who might be able to help?
How to develop a successful KM strategy Well done on getting this far. It is possible that what you have read so far is not new and hopefully most, if not all, of it makes sense. But now for the hard part … how to get there? How do we develop and implement a successful KM strategy? Let me begin by saying that there is no single KM strategy that works for all in-house teams alike. The strategy you adopt will need to take into account various factors including your corporate strategy, the composition of your team, the technology available and the budget or resourcing options. There is no point developing a strategy that doesn’t take these things into account, so make sure you have them front of mind. So, noting the parameters of your business case, I believe some common principles apply to any good KM strategy.
Principle one:
Develop and embed a culture focused on KM
I’ve heard Origin’s outgoing chairman state on numerous occasions, “culture eats strategy for breakfast” (and he may well have been quoting someone else at the time). I couldn’t agree
