One of the staples of TV drama is the workplace, another is espionage. The BBC is currently showing a short series, The Hour, in which those elements are combined with a touch of social/political comment in a not-so-distant historical setting — a BBC current affairs programme (The Hour of the title) in 1956, as Hungary is invaded by the Soviet Union and Egypt precipitates the Suez crisis. It isn’t the best thing that the BBC have done — Mad Men beats it for verisimilitude, nothing can touch Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for British cold war espionage drama, and at least one person who was in TV in the 1950s is adamant that its representation of news broadcasting is a long way from the reality. That said, it is relaxing Summer viewing.

One of the things that struck me, watching the most recent episode, is that everyone is intimately engaged with the objects of their work. Cameramen wield cameras; editors cut film; reporters write words (with a pen or pencil) on paper. And they do one thing at once. During the episode, the producer of The Hour is admonished by her superior (for having an affair with the programme’s presenter). As she enters the room, he is making notes in a file. He closes it while berating her for putting the programme, and her career, at risk. When finished, he returns to his paperwork. There is no doubt at any point during this sequence as to his focus, his priorities or his wider role.

I think we have lost that clarity. As I look around me, in all sorts of workplaces, there is little or no distinction in the environments inhabited by people who actually do very varied jobs. Generally, it looks like we all work with computers. People sit with a large flat surface in front of them, which is dominated by a box filled with electronics, umbilically attached via (in my case) ten cables to a variety of other bits of electronics, to power and to a wider network. One or two of those other pieces of hardware are really intrusive. The screens we work at (I have two) are our windows into the material that we produce — documents, emails, spreadsheets — to the information we consume, and to our connections with other people. But physically, they fail miserably to benefit our human connectivity. In my case, the screens sit between me and the rest of the occupants of my working room. We all sit in a group, facing each other, but our screens act as a barrier between our working environments. When we converse, we have to crane round the barriers, and we are easily distracted from the conversation by things that happen on the screens.

But if you asked the average law firm employee (whether a lawyer or not) what they do every day, very few would respond that they work with computers. They would speak in terms of managing teams, delivering quality advice to clients, supporting the wider business with training, information or know-how. Some of our IT colleagues might agree that they do work with computers, but some would claim instead that their role is to enhance the firm’s effectiveness and that computers are just the tools by which that is achieved. That is consistent with research conducted by Andrew McAfee, for example. At an organisational level, then, technology improves performance. However, it is also well-observed that many forms of technology, inappropriately used, can distract people and reduce their personal effectiveness. That is manifest in complaints about information overload, email management, social media at work, and so on.

The problem is that, through this box and its two big screens, I have access to absolutely everything I need — the software tools, the online information, the worldwide contacts — to do my job. Unfortunately, because everything is in the same place, it is hard to create clear boundaries between all these things. Outlook is open, so I see when email arrives even though I am working on a document. When I am focusing on an email on one project, it is sitting next to one on a different topic, so it is practically impossible not to skip to that topic before I am actually ready. We can discipline ourselves, but that actually makes work harder, and so we must be less effective.

In some organisations, the technology is configured to provide access just to the tools people need. This is typically the case in call centre environments, for example. I think this only really works when people are working through clearly defined processes. As soon as a degree of creativity is required, or where the information needs of a role are emergent, bounded technology starts to fail.

Instead, I think each of us needs to understand exactly what we need from the technology, to create a clear path to that, and to take steps to exclude the less relevant stuff.

My current role requires me to take responsibility for a group of people who have not previously thought of themselves as a single team. I shouldn’t do that from a desk which is at a significant distance from many of them. The technology may fool me into thinking that I am bridging that distance by sending emails and writing documents, but I am sure that isn’t really the case. We have technology to allow me to divest myself of the big box and its screens. I am seriously considering doing just that — doing my job, rather than working with computers.

Thanks to the generosity of Headshift, I was able to attend the Dachis Group’s London Social Business Summit at the end of March. One of the most interesting sessions that day was the presentation by Dave Gray of XPLANE. Dave outlined his current thinking about the nature of the company, which can be found summarised in the initial post on his new site, The Connected Company.

Dave is concerned about the short life span of the average company:

In a recent talk, John Hagel pointed out that the average life expectancy of a company in the S&P 500 has dropped precipitously, from 75 years (in 1937) to 15 years in a more recent study. Why is the life expectancy of a company so low? And why is it dropping?

He is also worried about their productivity:

A recent analysis in the CYBEA Journal looked at profit-per-employee at 475 of the S&P 500, and the results were astounding: As you triple the number of employees, their productivity drops by half (Chart here).

This “3/2 law” of employee productivity, along with the death rate for large companies, is pretty scary stuff. Surely we can do better?

I believe we can. The secret, I think, lies in understanding the nature of large, complex systems, and letting go of some of our traditional notions of how companies function.

The largest complex system that still seems to work is the city.

Cities aren’t just complex and difficult to control. They are also more productive than their corporate counterparts. In fact, the rules governing city productivity stand in stark contrast to the ominous “3/2 rule” that applies to companies. As companies add people, productivity shrinks. But as cities add people, productivity actually grows.

A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that as the working population in a given area doubles, productivity (measured in this case by the rate of invention) goes up by 20%. This finding is borne out by study after study. If you’re interested in going deeper, take a look at this recent New York Times article: A Physicist Solves the City.

Drawing on a study of long-lived successful companies commissioned by Shell Oil, Dave spots three characteristics of those companies also shared by cities:

Ecosystems: Long-lived companies were decentralized. They tolerated “eccentric activities at the margins.” They were very active in partnerships and joint ventures. The boundaries of the company were less clearly delineated, and local groups had more autonomy over their decisions, than you would expect in the typical global corporation.

Strong identity: Although the organization was loosely controlled, long-lived companies were connected by a strong, shared culture. Everyone in the company understood the company’s values. These companies tended to promote from within in order to keep that culture strong. Cities also share this common identity: think of the difference between a New Yorker and a Los Angelino, or a Parisian, for example.

Active listening: Long-lived companies had their eyes and ears focused on the world around them and were constantly seeking opportunities. Because of their decentralized nature and strong shared culture, it was easier for them to spot opportunities in the changing world and act, proactively and decisively, to capitalize on them.

The whole post is worth reading and reflecting on. Dave’s prescription for success, for companies to be more like cities, is to shun divisional structures, and to build on networks and connections instead. This has been refined in a more recent post into a ‘podular’ system.

A pod is a small, autonomous unit that is enabled and empowered to deliver the things that customers value.

By value, I mean anything that’s a part of a service that delivers value, even though the customer may not see it. For example, in a construction firm, the activities valued by customers are those that are directly related to building. The accounting department of a construction firm is not part of the value delivery system, it’s a support team. But in an accounting firm, any activity related to accounting is part of the customer value delivery system.

There’s a reason that pods need to focus on value-creating activities rather than support activities. Support activities might need to be organized differently.

This idea appears to be closely related to Steve Denning’s notion of Radical Management, as described in his latest book. It also reflects the way that some professional service firms organise themselves. That’s what brings us back to Jordan Furlong’s question.

Why do law firms exist? Or, more properly, why should law firms continue to exist? (One important reason why they exist is that their history brought us to this point. What might happen to them in the future is actually more interesting.)

Jordan’s post starts with Ronald Coase, but also points to a number of ways in which law firms might not meet Coase’s standards.

Companies exist, therefore, because they:

• reduce transaction costs,
• build valuable culture,
• organize production,
• assemble collective knowledge, and
• spur innovation.

So now let’s take a look at law firms. I don’t think it would be too huge a liberty to state that as a general rule, law firms:

• develop relatively weak and fragmented cultures,
• manage production and process indifferently,
• assign and perform work inefficiently,
• share knowledge haphazardly and grudgingly, and
• display almost no interest in innovation.

That’s an inventory of defects that would make Ronald Coase wonder exactly what it is that keeps law firms together as commercial entities.

Worse than that, Jordan points to a range of recent commentaries suggesting that things aren’t getting any better. I think he is correct. In fact, it is interesting to note that John Roberts spotted the germ of the problem in his 2004 book, The Modern Firm.

Many authors, including Ronald Coase and Herbert Simon, have identified the essential nature of the firm as the reliance on heirarchic, authority relations to replace the inherent equality among participants that markes market dealings. When you join a firm, you accept the right of the executives and their delegates to direct your behaviour, at least over a more-or-less commonly understood range of activities. …

Others … have challenged this view. They argue that any appearance of authority in the firm is illusory. For them, the relationship between employer and employee is completely parallel to that between customer and butcher. In each case, the buyer (of labor services or meat) can tell the seller what is wanted on a particular day, and the seller can acquiesce and be paid, or refuse and be fired. For these scholars, the firm is simply “a nexus of contracts” — a particularly dense collection of the sort of arrangements that characterise markets.

While there are several objections to this argument, we focus on one. It is that, when a customer “fires” a butcher, the butcher keeps the inventory, tools, shop, and other customers she had previously. When an employee leaves a firm, in contrast, she is typically denied access to the firm’s resources. The employee cannot conduct business using the firm’s name; she cannot use its machinery or patents; and she probably has limited access to the people and networks in the firm, certainly for commercial purposes and perhaps even socially. (The Modern Firm, pp.103-4)

The benefits Roberts identifies are almost always missing in a law firm. The firm’s name may be less significant than the lawyer’s and there is little machinery or patents. In the seven years since the book was published access to networks and people has become infinitely more straightforward, thanks to developments in social software and similar technologies.

Joining Roberts’s insights with those of Dave Gray and Jordan Furlong, I think it is likely that we will see much more fluid structures in law firms in coming years. Dave Gray’s podular arrangement need not be restricted to one organisation — what is to stop clients creating their own pods for specific projects, drawing together the good lawyers from a variety of firms? Could the panel arrangement now commonly in use by larger companies be a Trojan horse to allow them to pick off key lawyers whenever they need them? Technology is only going to make that easier.

So that leaves the support functions. In Dave Gray’s podular model, support is provided by a backbone, or platform.

For a podular system to work, cultural and technical standards are imperative. This means that a pod’s autonomy does not extend to choices in shared standards and protocols. This kind of system needs a strong platform that clearly articulates those standards and provides a mechanism for evolving them when necessary.

For small and large companies alike, the most advantageous standards are those that are most widely adopted, because those standards will allow you to plug in more easily to the big wide world – and the big wide world always offers more functionality, better and more cheaply than you can build it yourself. Platform architecture is about coordination and consistency, so the best way to organize it may not be podular. When it comes to language, protocols, culture and values, you don’t want variability, you want consistency. Shared values is one of the best ways to ensure consistent behavior when you lack a formal hierarchy. Consistency in standards is an absolute requirement if you want to enable autonomous units.

Interestingly, there is often little variation between different law firms in terms of their technical standards. In some practice areas, these are dictated by external agencies (courts, industry associations, etc.), whilst in others they converge because of intervention by common suppliers (in the UK, many firms use know-how and precedents provided by PLC) or simply the fact that in order to do their job lawyers have to share their basic knowledge (first-draft documents often effectively disclose a firm’s precedents to their competitors). It is a small step to a more generally accepted foundation for legal work.

Will clients push for this? Would they benefit from some form of crowd-sourced backbone to support lawyers working for them in a podular fashion? Time will tell, but don’t wait for the train to leave the station before you decide to board it.

Few large US firms, at least in their US offices, have PSL ratios even approaching those commonly found in the UK. (Some large US firms are now increasing the number of PSLs though in my view, it is premature to call this a trend.)

I think Ron is right to play down the trend. What would interest me more is to know what the US PSL community is being tasked with. That is because I think the role of PSLs in many UK law firms has changed significantly over the past three years or so, and that pace of change is not likely to slacken.

First, some history.

Harriet Creamer was Freshfields’ first PSL (and therefore one of the first in the City) in the late 1980s. She then became a partner with responsibility for knowledge management, and is now a consultant.  Over the past couple of years she has presented at a number of conferences and workshops on the changing role of the PSL. (Reports of those presentations can easily be found on the web, if you are interested.) In November 2009, Harriet summarised her thinking in an article in The Lawyer, entitled “Knowledge management needs serious consideration.” In it, she provides a potted history of the PSL and KM function in law firms, and finishes with a rallying call for change:

At many firms, the basic organisational tasks took longer than expected, and ­eventually became so time-consuming that many KM lawyers remained almost wholly focused on them. In some cases management of the KM function was poor and priorities were commonly set by client partners who misunderstood the ultimate goal or who had particular axes to grind. The vision of the KM function as the ­efficiency engine of the firm, constantly streamlining working practices and driving forward proprietary knowhow, became blurred. Now is the time to clarify it.

To do this it is critical that KM lawyers engage proactively with the business. Their central focus should be on ­profitability. They will need a clear ­understanding, at both the financial and technical levels, of the work undertaken and the systems adopted in the different practice areas.

The comments on Harriet’s piece are intriguing. They don’t display much insight or awareness, and some of them are unnecessarily vituperative. If they are typical of lawyers’ attitudes to KM and PSLs, we have a very steep hill to climb.

One of the firms whose PSLs have taken a lead in the strategic reaction to market change is Berwin Leighton Paisner. Lucy Dillon, Director of KM at BLP (and formerly a litigation PSL at Linklaters), wrote a short note for Law Business Review (“PSLs – Gatekeepers of Excellence”) summarising the ways in which she has seen the PSL role change over the last 20 years.

PSLs, with their experience of practice, are in an excellent position to help review internal processes to identify areas of inefficiency and offer solutions for improving service delivery. Standard forms, document automation, checklists, work flow systems, and FAQs are all areas where a PSL’s experience can be invaluable. They can apply their practical experience and their holistic approach to transactional work to “unbundle” the traditional deal model and identify smarter ways of delivering on clients’ objectives. Such solutions are a pre-requisite to faster turn-around times, while operating in a risk managed environment.

Some of the initiatives that Lucy describes are unique to BLP, and different firms will have different needs. The general theme — that PSLs can take part in driving change is, however, a universal one. I wonder how many firms can say that their PSLs are empowered to do this.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am fond of drawing parallels with other areas of work to try and illuminate the challenges facing law firms (especially in their knowledge-related activities). I think a good comparison here is to consider the ways in which traditional media are dealing with changes in technology and reader behaviours.

In some (limited) respects, the role of a journalist parallels that of PSLs. Journalists are skilled at taking undifferentiated chunks of data and information and packaging them into useful chunks of knowledge. Historically this distillation and delivery has defined their role. Over the past decade, this traditional approach has become inadequate in the face of (a) rolling 24-hour TV news, (b) contribution to news channels by non-journalists (so-called ‘user-generated content’) and (c) commentary away from the news channels (on Wikipedia, blogs, Twitter, etc.). One result has been a huge decline in advertising revenues (exacerbated by the recession) and closures of many long-established newspapers. 

If you are interested in some reactions to the challenge facing journalism, I have a number of relevant bookmarks stored online. However, I think a couple are worth singling out.

Jason Fry is a freelance writer, editor, and consultant in New York. Writing about the challenge facing sports journalism in November 2009 (“This Is Broken: From Game Stories to, Well, Everything”), he poses a key question.

The question to ask about game stories is the same question to ask about everything we do in journalism: If we were starting today, would we do this? That’s the question. Not whether we’ve spent a lot of money on the infrastructure of producing something a certain way, or whether a journalistic form is a cherished tradition, or whether it still works for a niche audience, or whether it can still be done very well by the best practitioners of the craft. All of those questions are distractions from the real business at hand.

If we were starting today, would we do this?

So: If I were starting a sports site (or a sports section on a general-news Web site), would I pay a reporter or some third-party source for a summary of yesterday’s game, knowing that today my audience is much more likely to have watched the game, can get a recap on SportsCenter once an hour during the morning, can see the highlights on demand from a team or league site, and can watch a condensed game on the iPhone?

Absolutely not.

The problem as he sees it is that the medium for which traditional journalism is designed (the daily newspaper of record) has been overtaken by other sources. People get more value from those other sources, but journalists have failed to see that:

Why didn’t we change? Journalists are masters at filtering, synthesizing and presenting information, yet we’ve spent more than a decade repurposing a 19th-century form of specialized storytelling instead of starting fresh with the possibilities of a new medium. Newspapers could have been Wikipedia, instead of being left to try and learn from it. And what are we learning? The news article is in some fundamental ways just as broken as the game story — if it weren’t, Jimmy Wales wouldn’t see a surge of traffic to Wikipedia in the wake of any big news event. We need to rethink the basics: If we were starting today, would we do this? But when will we unshackle ourselves from print and really ask the question? And at what point will the answer come too late to matter?

That question “If we were starting today, would we do this?” is one that I think all firms need to ask themselves about a whole range of issues. In this context, I am curious to know whether US firms that have adopted the PSL role have started to define that role from scratch or whether they have adopted the historic UK model without significantly adapting it for changed circumstances.

(If you are interested in reading further into the journalism debate, I would also recommend Jonathan Stray’s article, “Does Journalism Work?”, which examines the ‘why’ of journalism, rather than the ‘how’ that is Jason Fry’s focus. Stray’s piece still has parallels with knowledge support in law firms, but they are much more strained. However, his hypothesis is an interesting one, and I may return to consider the ‘why’ of law firm KM at some point.)

I simply use this ; “Knowledge management is about what to DO when you don’t Know”.

Over the past few weeks, I have been contemplating this comment. I think it has much to commend it, but it also raises a slight terminological problem.

What do we do when our knowledge runs out? I don’t think we do ‘knowledge management’ as individuals. We certainly aim to develop, deepen, extend, broaden or redirect our knowledge — this is learning. Also, we don’t necessarily go to the same places for that learning every time. Organisations might aim to do things to facilitate that learning process, and we might call this ‘knowledge management’, but I am less and less certain that this is a sensible phrase.

Separately, I was reading Knoco’s recent newsletter (pdf), and found an article which builds on Yasmin Fodil’s experiences observing knowledge and learning at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which she reported on her blog (and cross-posted). In the blog post there are some useful diagrams summarising the people-centric approach used at Goddard; the whole piece is well-worth reading (and following the links to the Goddard material itself). Knoco took one of those diagrams and embellished it. I have embedded that one below (click to see the original).

This table made me reflect on my own knowledge and learning behaviours, as well as those I see around me. In the column headed “How can I learn it?” there are certainly some tools and techniques that benefit from external (call it ‘KM’) input, but the starting point (learning from one’s own experiences) depends on individual commitment.

I found it a bit more useful to show these tiers of learning as concentric circles:

I think this makes two things clearer.

Firstly, what I myself know contributes to the knowledge of my network, which in turn is part of the wider firm’s knowledge (although people’s personal networks usually include participants from outside their own organisation, or their immediate working group, I am ignoring that for simplicity here). When individuals have good personal knowledge practices (even if it is just making good notes that can be easily accessed and used in one-to-one conversations), their wider contribution is almost inevitably higher quality — to the benefit of those around them.

The second thing is that the further sources of knowledge and learning are from the individual, the more help they will need to make the most of them. I think that’s what we mean when we talk about knowledge management. But it isn’t so much ‘management’ as facilitation of knowledge. (And I am not crazy about ‘facilitation’ either. Alternative suggestions welcome.)

As a result of this cogitation, I have amended the description of KM in the comment I quoted above.

• For everyone, knowledge development is about what to do when you don’t know.
  • When you don’t know, you need to ask: from whom can I learn? When you see people around you who appear not to know, you need to ask: how can we learn together? or what can they learn from me?
• For the firm, facilitating knowledge development is about creating the best environment to encourage effective learning and knowledge sharing.
  • This virtuous circle of knowledge exchange and learning helps to create a more agile organisation primed to respond creatively and innovatively to client demand, legal change, and market shifts.

That last justification of our knowledge activities is one that often crops up. Better use of knowledge promotes innovation goes without saying, doesn’t it? But if that was the only reason organisations did ‘KM’ then why do all that traditional stuff around ‘best practices’, standard documents, house style and taxonomies and so on?

The commonly-stated problem with all that boring stuff (and I have been as guilty as anyone else of such comments) is that it just crystallises past practices, that if we do what we have always done, we will just get the results we always got. But sometimes that consistency and predictability is really what we (and our clients) actually want.

We (and of course, I really mean ‘I’) need to be careful not to jettison the baby with the dirty bathwater. Organisational knowledge activities (building on good individual behaviours) do contribute to innovation and creativity, but they also ensure consistency, improved quality and risk-avoidance in the boring old stuff as well. The challenge is to steer a sensible course between the two — to do the things that will achieve both aims, even when they appear to conflict.

So why does KM continue to expand beyond its core remit today? My theory is that KM professionals span multiple disciplines and think laterally. They can handle complex problems that fall outside the boundaries of other support functions. Moreover, successful KM professionals have gained the confidence of lawyers; many come from the practice; others have worked closely with lawyers for a long time. Whatever their background, they develop excellent rapport with partners and practice groups. Of course, many are lawyers and in the caste system that defines BigLaw, that is a big plus.

A number of people have supported his observations in comments on the post, which Ron has extracted into a separate post. For example, Patrick DiDomenico (CKO at Gibbons PC and blogger at LawyerKM) says:

I’m head KM (CKO) at my firm, but I also manage the library and litigation support department, have an active role in our E-Discovery Task Force, and am the social media evangelist (among other things). My role as a former practicing litigator at my firm has a lot to do with what I now do for the firm. The fact that I do these things does not make them “KM activities.” Rather, these are some of the things that the head of KM happens to do.

And Meredith Williams of Baker Donelson agrees:

These days CKOs and KM professionals are being asked to expand their roles further and further in addition to continuing many traditional KM tasks. As Patrick referenced, I too aid in multiple projects that are not traditional KM such as Social Media, Competitive Intelligence, E-Discovery, Legal Project Management, Alternative Fee Arrangements and Mobility.

In part, I think what Ron describes is in fact a change in what we understand to be part of KM (in any organisation). Social media is an example — one of the things that traditional document- and repository-based KM spectacularly failed to do was to draw people together to share their knowledge. Various forms of social media now allow us to address that challenge. From that perspective, law firms are just the same as other organisations.

However, there are a couple of other interpretations which I find more troubling.

In The End of Lawyers? Richard Susskind bemoans the tendency lawyers have to describe their jobs by reference to anything other than advising clients on the law. He talks of lawyers referring to themselves more as project managers or commercial advisors. (I still need to retrieve my copy, so I’m afraid I can’t provide a better quotation or reference.) Putting aside the question whether they are actually any good at those roles, it is odd that many lawyers would prefer to be thought of as gifted amateurs turning their hands to any odd job that comes along, rather than talented and focused professionals — masters of their own specialisms. That tendency really comes to the fore in knowledge roles. Amongst all the functions that modern law firms need to support their core fee-earning function (take your pick from HR, finance, marketing, IT, office services, sales, building and facilities management, training, library, etc.) the knowledge team is often alone in recruiting predominantly from the ranks of practising lawyers. In all those other areas, firms are willing to accept the advice and insight provided by functional specialists, but it appears that the non-legal KMer has yet to make an appreciable impact. 

One consequence of this ‘lawyers can do anything’ attitude is that the firm is less likely to get the benefits that come from the wider perspective and expertise of the knowledge professional. The benefit is that the knowledge support the firm gets reflects what lawyers need. I think there is merit on both sides, but there is a risk that a firm using lawyers in these roles may find that they learn little from the interesting approaches to knowledge development and use in other organisations and contexts. They may just get the usual precedents and know-how.

(By coincidence, Tim Bratton opens a similar can of worms when he suggests that firms could use lawyers in a dedicated client relationship role:

Is there a role in large City law firms for a lawyer who has no billing targets but whose role is to act effectively as an account manager for a small number of major clients?  I think there is.  But this would only work if it is a real role, it cannot be farmed out to business development or marketing.  To succeed from a client perspective it has to be a role undertaken by a lawyer.

As a general counsel, Tim may favour lawyers. However, not all law firm clients are lawyers — many are finance directors, bankers, commercial managers, company secretaries. Should firms employ relationship managers that match those roles too? And are clients prepared to accept the greater (albeit hidden) cost of employing lawyers as relationship managers? In fact, client relationship management is widely practised in other professional services firms (especially advertising, for example). Why should firms turn their back on that expertise or develop it themselves at huge cost?)

My other concern is that when firms take the view that their knowledge people can be directed to any new project (possibly with only a tenuous link to their core knowledge focus) they aren’t really demonstrating respect for those people or their activities. If your role is valued by the organisation, it will project you in it. The procurement manager who monitors the firm’s supplier relationships and negotiates hard to keep the costs of contracts down is unlikely to find themselves diverted into managing working capital, even if that role uses very similar skills. When a firm asks their knowledge leader to take on consideration of the firm’s billing structures and alternative fee arrangements, I wonder why it was felt that (a) the knowledge work could be scaled down and (b) the expertise of the firm’s own accountants and business managers could be ignored in favour of the gifted amateur. A callous interpretation might be that in fact the firm does not value the knowledge function at all, and so its senior people are fair game for diversion to other (probably equally unvalued) projects.

On the other hand, the response might be that these new activities are actually highly valued and so it is important for a senior, respected person to lead them. This is a compelling argument, but it calls to mind the advice to CEOs that I found in an HBR blog last year. In the fourth of a series of conversations on personal productivity with Bob Pozen, chairman emeritus of MFS Investment Management and senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, he was asked “How do you decide what to spend your time on when you’re the boss?” His response was interesting:

Top executives usually say they set their priorities and then figure out how to implement them. But in this process many executives make a critical mistake. I’ve noticed this when I’ve mentored new CEOs. They say, “Here are the top five priorities for the company. Who would be the best at carrying out each priority?” Then they come up with themselves as the answer in all five areas. It might be the correct answer, but it’s the wrong question.

The question is not who’s best at performing high-priority functions, but which things can you and only you as the CEO get done? If you don’t ask yourself that question, your time allocations are bound to be wrong.

For Pozen, then, senior people should stick to the things that truly need their attention. To do otherwise dilutes their attention and limits the opportunities for development of others in the organisation. He actually extends this principle further down the business:

What about those of us who aren’t CEOs?

The key, I’ve found, is to become messianic about the principle that everybody owns their own space. This is the human resources analogy to bottom-up investing.

Under this approach, every employee is viewed as the owner of a small business — his or her division, or subdivision or working group; the performance of this unit is his or her responsibility. As the boss, my role is to provide my reports with resources, give them guidance and help them do battle with other people in the broader organization. But they own their own unit.

If law firms’ knowledge leaders are really to be respected and to ‘own their own unit’ they need to be protected from distractions that take them away from that core responsibility. They and the firm get the best results that way.

Another response might be that some of these new projects are experimental, and may not persist. That is fair: why invest in something if it may be temporary? But look at this from a different angle: if you aren’t investing in it, might you be guaranteeing that it will be temporary? Here’s an alternative approach: given that (as ever) law firms are facing many of these issues some time after other organisations, why not buy in expertise on a fixed (but renewable) contract? If you want to explore how matters might be managed or billed differently, why not take on people from the major consulting businesses or accountancy firms to see if their experiences in non-legal professional services firms might be transferable? If you are, in Pozen’s terms, messianic about people owning their own space, and you are exploring a new space, get a new person to lead the exploration.

Knowledge leaders should, by all means, explore new ways of developing and using knowledge in the firm (and they may be able to contribute that expertise to the new activities), but (a) that should not be seen as a change in KM itself and (b) respect for the knowledge function is best expressed by not drawing its people into unrelated new projects.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 5,200 times in 2010. That’s about 13 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 14 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 122 posts. There were 4 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 2mb.

The busiest day of the year was January 20th with 195 views. The most popular post that day was Knowledge sharing: it may not be what you think it is.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were twitter.com, aboveandbeyondkm.com, lmodules.com, Google Reader, and facebook.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for baby boom graph, social norms in the work place, people whispering, birth rate uk, and societal norms in the workplace.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Knowledge sharing: it may not be what you think it is January 2010
10 comments

Your boom is not my boom February 2009
4 comments

What do we do with knowledge? January 2010
7 comments

Social norms and knowledge sharing March 2009
4 comments

KM in law firms: rising to a challenge November 2010
2 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

Some time ago, I attended a two-day workshop on knowledge management in law firms (probably the only formal KM training I have had). One of the principles that stuck with me was that KM value can be judged by how well it supports the core elements of law firm profitability. Memorably, this comes with an acronym: RULES.

• Realization of billing rates;
• Utilization of attorneys;
• Leverage of lawyers;
• Expense control; and
• Speed of billings and collections.

KM can help improve all of these in one way or another, and it is always useful to take time to contemplate whether we are doing our best in each of these areas. As usual, it is also important to distinguish the knowledge component from other areas of management. KM is not about improvements in time recording, for example — that may be a joint effort between IT (building a system to automate timesheets), HR (designing processes to help partners recognise good practice and manage poor time-keepers), Finance (communicating the impact of good time-keeping, billing, etc), and BD (collating feedback from clients on good and bad practice). However, along with these functions, KM people will have a part to play — perhaps by unpacking what lawyers actually do when they work and exposing where the pinch-points are, or developing clear checklists and guidance to ensure that there are as few obstacles as possible to doing all the important elements of the job.

One of the interesting points in profitability is leverage. As Toby Brown makes clear in his 3 Geeks… post today, many partners fail to understand the financial importance of driving work down to the lowest effective level.

Yet most firms don’t get this. Primarily because comp systems reward a different behavior. They’re not designed to reward profits – they reward hours and revenue. This is the case since these compensation systems were designed under a different model. This was a cost-plus business model, where profit was built into prices (a.k.a. rates). So partners have not focused on the metric of profitability in this fashion.

Once partners understand this, then it becomes quite natural to shift work to its lowest cost, effective labor source. Ron Baker will likely appreciate this statement: Tasks should be performed at their cheapest, most effective, level of timekeeper. This behavior will lead to improved profitability for law firms. But more importantly, this same behavior will lead to lower costs of service for clients. On a simple, illustrative level this means partners should not be performing tasks associates or paralegals can perform sufficiently well. Doing so undermines profits and raises costs for clients.

That point about clients is important. One of the discredited arguments against law firm KM was to claim that “KM is about saving time, and we don’t need to do that because we charge our clients for our time and so saving it undermines our income stream.”

That was always a poor argument (and to be honest is a bit of a straw man), but now we know how much the economy has affected our clients and most firms, if not all, profess to understand their clients. However much lawyers try to empathise, many of them will miss the impact of overruns on legal fees. For me it was brought home by Tony Williams in the keynote I referred to in my last post. He pointed out that in addition to delivering commercial legal solutions for their companies, General Counsel will be under pressure from their Finance Directors to manage costs to a pre-determined budget. Any overrun on that budget will require a many-fold increase in turnover to cover the cost.

For example, take Tesco, which appears to have a net profit margin of about 4% at present. (I know nothing of that business, apart from being an occasional user of its retail services (usually under duress). All information replicated here is taken at face value from public sources.) In rough terms, this means for every £100,000 of revenue, Tesco spends £96,000, and only makes £4,000 profit. Any cost overrun eats directly into the profit (it can’t come from anywhere else), and so has to be matched with a significantly greater increase in sales. A law firm acting for Tesco that allows costs on a given transaction to increase by just £12,000 (maybe three associates taking a day and a half longer than they should have done on the job) will require the supermarket to make £300,000 more in sales just to maintain its margin. Which partner wants to tell their client that because of the firm’s shoddy KM, the client needs to find an additional £300,000 revenue? Maybe the RoI on KM needs to be measured by reference to a reduction in the number of difficult conversations partners have with clients?

The other point about valuing KM was made very forcefully by Nick Milton, developing a point made by Larry Prusak.

When I was at the KMRussia conference with Larry last week, he asked a question which made me really think hard, and its an interesting question for anyone concerned with KM metrics.

He asked “What percentage of a company’s non-capital spend, is spent on knowledge”?

Now I would be thinking in terms of 3% maybe – perhaps the training budget, or perhaps the budget spent on conferences, but Larry suggested that would be quite wrong.

His answer was – 60%

60% of an organisations non-capital spend, is spent on knowledge.

The 60% figure is difficult to pin down — it depends on what other non-capital costs a business has. (For a law firm, rent may be a higher cost than for many other businesses.) The basic equation is simple enough, though:

Take the company wages bill, take away what this bill would be if everyone was paid as a new graduate, and that’s the investment in knowledge. After all, if knowledge was not valuable, you could staff the company with smart young graduates at a fraction of the cost. The only reason you don’t, is because knowledge is valuable.

Nick’s post got me thinking. How much do law firms value knowledge and, more interestingly, what return do they get on it? That latter point was not part of Nick’s argument, but it is one that can be explored quite easily for a business (like a law firm) that charges directly for the use of its knowledge. Just as one can get a figure for the value of knowledge by totting up a notional wages bill as if everyone was a raw recruit, one can do the same for the return on this value by calculating notional fee income for these raw recruits and comparing that figure with the actual fee income.

I have postulated an imaginary law firm: with 1060 staff and partners, a total of 120 partners in three grades, 500 other qualified fee-earners (in four bands), plus 75 trainees. The 365 support staff are grouped into five bands. Unfortunately, it is not possible to embed Google spreadsheets here, but this link will go to the full set of data.

Using some rough data for salaries (I have given the partners a salary for the purposes of the calculation, even though they would usually see a share of profit), fee rates, and so on, I have arrived at the following figures.

• Actual salary bill: £56,350,000
• Actual revenue: £178,887,500
• Notional salaries: £25,750,000
• Notional revenue: £93,200,000

Please take a look at the figures in the spreadsheet and suggest amendments n the comments — I don’t claim that this is a perfect model. However, it does suggest that this firm pays its people a knowledge premium of £30,600,000 annually, in return for which it recoups additional income of £85,687,500. This looks like a pretty spectacular return on investment to me.

So firms face serious pressures on their structure and downstream demand. Now there is a (related) challenge to the traditional forms of upstream supply. Baby lawyers are very likely to be created in different ways in the future. There are lots of places where more information can be found (here is a good place to start), but I wanted to concentrate on some things that occur to me from my own experience.

Some personal background (skip if you like)

I was lucky enough to study law as an undergraduate at the University of Warwick in the mid-1980s. From its inception in the late 1960s, this institution pioneered a different approach to the study of law — examining it in its social and human context, rather than as a disembodied corpus of statutes and cases. This is a more common view than it used to be — my Warwick generation was one of the last to be seen by the law firm market as somewhat unusual. Amongst other things, academics at Warwick promoted clinical education as part of an academic course. I didn’t take advantage of this opportunity, as I had set my sights on an academic career at a fairly early stage. (This was partly a reaction to my vicarious experience of private and in-house practice during a period of work prior to unversity, and partly a recognition that I didn’t have the right stuff to be a professional success.) I therefore spent four years (plus an additional master’s year in Italy) studying more law and becoming increasingly academic. One exception to this was the Summer that I spent attached to Wayne State University Law School. This short exchange programme opened my eyes to the different way that US lawyers are educated, and to the wealth of experience that JD students bring to their studies (and future careers) from their undergraduate degrees.

So then I started on my academic career, teaching subjects that students tended to undervalue and even to reject. Why? Mainly because, by the early 1990s, there was a growing attraction to legal careers in the City of London and other commercial centres where high legal salaries were becoming common. Put bluntly, many of my students didn’t have an interest in the law (especially not as a subject for academic study): they just wanted the kudos and financial reward of being lawyers. At the same time, I was aware that some of my fellow law graduates who had entered the legal profession were less than satisfied — they missed having studied subjects they really enjoyed (anything from Physics to History) as undergraduates. As a result, I became much less convinced than many of my colleagues that a law degree was a natural precursor to a legal career. (It is possible in the UK to become a lawyer with a non-law degree by taking a one-year conversion course.) I often stuggled with the regularly-expressed view of the late Peter Birks that legal practice and a law degree should be closely entwined.

On leaving the academy for legal practice (albeit in a support role), I found myself for the first time in the company of many lawyers who hadn’t had the benefit of a law degree. This has been a mixed experience over the past ten years. On the one hand, I do not think I could say with any certainty which of the partners in the firm I work for have a law degree. By the time someone has marked themselves out as an outstanding lawyer and worthy of partnership, their undergraduate degree is largely irrelevant — the expertise developed and experience gained in practice is more significant. On the other hand, I feel that some of our less-experienced lawyers may miss the breadth of legal understanding that comes from a law degree and cannot be replicated in a conversion course. As I said when I taught it, the insights provided by the philosophy of law are not worthless — they help good lawyers make the right intuitive leaps when faced with novel fact situations or legal scenarios.

(In case it needs saying, these observations are purely personal, do not reflect the views of my past or present employers, and do not reflect on any particular individuals.)

What do I think about the state of legal education currently (welcome back if you tuned out of the memoir)

In general terms there is a tension between the legal profession and legal educators (at university level anyway). This is exemplified in the recent remarks of Nigel Savage, Chief Executive of the College of Law (until about 20 years ago, the College had a monopoly on the training of prospective solicitors).

Let’s take the undergraduate LL.B law degree. What does it really prepare students for? It is taught largely by individuals who have never practised law and who increasingly have PhDs in a wide range of areas that bear no resemblance to the practice of law. Students are required to spend a semester – or if they are lucky an academic year – studying contract law, at the end of which they will never have seen a contract. Students will be told they are taught to think like lawyers. They are not. They are taught to wade through bizarre factual problems, which is a useful exercise, but what they really need is to think in terms of solutions.

Richard Moorhead (a fellow Warwick graduate) has dealt compellingly with a similar objection by the Legal Services Institute, that universities play no part in the creation of new law.

We regularly engage with the judiciary, are cited in their judgments from time to time and train them on current developments. In other words, our research activity is regularly shared with industry, public bodies, government and governmental agencies and it informs our teaching. If the reader will permit me a rare moment of modesty, I should also say we are by no means atypical.

A legitimate question is to what extent does this benefit students? This is one of the many known unknowns of legal education. I believe it does (indeed I have a little data suggesting it does) but I cannot really prove it. I believe that being taught by someone who is working (I hesitate to use the phrase but I can find not other) at the cutting edge is an experience which has significant motivational benefits for student learning but also teaches them important lessons about how law is constructed and fought over and the context which law and lawers operate within. Much of the best research being conducted in law also ensures they understand how contextual law is. A lot of law depends on personalities, politics and money. It is a human system. Understanding the social, economic and political contexts within which law is created and functions is, in my view, an essential part of a modern legal education. Context is everywhere and needs to be better understood. One reasons is that students have to better understand ‘facts’: to my mind legal education focuses far too strongly on the rules that are handed down. Another is that context is vital to understanding the utility of law: in some contexts this means developing a better understanding of philosophical constructs like justice in others this is about starting the development of commercial awareness. Of course commercial firms commonly request this from applicants but I believe it has a broader significance. A key lesson which will be learnt through the Legal Service Act reforms is how justice and business rub up against each other. One of the reasons the professions may be about to hit trouble is they have largely been unprepared for this because they have focused on the internal norms of the legal system rather than the political and economic forces that shape it.

I agree entirely with Richard. The examples he gives of the ways in which he and his colleagues influence the law fit perfectly with my experience in a different university. One of my former colleagues was largely responsible for the creation of the enduring power of attorney, which fixed a fundamental problem with the management of the affairs of the mentally incapable. Another became and still serves as a judge of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, whilst remaining an active academic.

However, I think we still have to deal with Nigel Savage’s concern that undergraduate lawyers are unreasonably promised that they will become able to think like lawyers. I recall being uneasy about making such a statement myself. What does it mean to think like a lawyer? Do academic lawyers think in different ways from practising lawyers? Do academic lawyers address their subject material in a substantially different way from academics in politics, history, sociology or literature? Is ‘thinking like a lawyer’ just a pig in a poke when sold by the academy?

It is often useful to see what others think of us, and this is certainly true of the Lord Upjohn lecture given by David Edmonds, Chair of the Legal Services Board, earlier this month. Edmonds is not a lawyer, but is hugely experienced in public and private sector leadership roles. The LSB is responsible for overseeing the whole range of regulators of legal professions in England and Wales. That is the context from which Edmonds spoke about the challenges facing legal education.

Let me, as a layman, suggest some areas that education and training needs to cover:

• Navigating the law
• Professional skills – particularly in applying legal principles to the facts of the case, but also the procedural knowledge applicable to different areas of law
• Functional skills, such as drafting and advocacy
• Client-handling and other wrongly termed soft skills – every other part of the economy regards those as professional and rightly so.
• Management skills and commercial awareness
• Ethics – last, in this case, implies anything but least.

Ethics is an tricky one — John Flood always has interesting things to say about this issue, but I haven’t had the chance to grapple with it yet.

The others are more familiar to me. Unsurprisingly, I am confident that degree courses in law can cover the first point and most of the second. Navigating and applying the law is at the heart of any law degree. They may struggle with some of the procedural details, but many students will acquire that knowledge in optional courses. The rest is a challenge: functional, soft and management skills, or commercial awareness, are rarely at the core of any undergraduate programme. And in fact I do not think they would be well-placed there anyway. It is important to know and understand the context of the work being done to get to grips effectively with such topics.

I am not even sure that these elements can be effectively assimilated during the period of vocational training that students undergo before joining law firms. Although it is far more progressive than the old Law Society Finals course administered by the College of Law decades ago, the Legal Practice Course is still usually distinct from real legal practice — few firms actively engage with this stage of legal education. It is only when trainee solicitors arrive in the firm that they can start to understand properly what clients require of lawyers — because they are finally faced with real clients expressing their requirements in clear and certain terms. What better learning experience could there be?

If the training contract is where our lawyers really start to become lawyers (not just thinking like them, but being them), should we not focus on making this period the best learning experience possible? Can lawyers learn from the professions where learning really works on the job?

Follow @JamesGrandage@JamesGrandage
James Grandage

The ability to listen and engage as well as having our internal intelligence all in one place would be amazing.

17 November 2010 09:26 via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

My response was to suggest that he had it already: a brain.

On reflection, however, it appears that James was seeking what many firms want — a brain for the whole organisation. To be able to create and recall institutional memories, to process sensations gathered by ears and eyes and to use those sensations to engage with other organisations (or people) and their brains.

In the name of knowledge management, many organisations have created databases and repositories that are intended to operate as brains as far as the technology will allow. Unfortunately, their actual performance often falls somewhat short of this promise. Why might this be?

One answer is suggested by the experience of the Scarecrow in Frank L. Baum’s Wizard of Oz. You will recall that he accompanied Dorothy on her journey to Oz in order to ask the Wizard for a brain, because that is what he wants above all else. As they travel down the Yellow Brick Road, the Scarecrow’s shows by his actions that in fact he has a brain, and can use it. When they get to Oz, he is recognised as the wisest man there.

Many law firms are on a similar journey. They labour in the belief that all they need to complete themselves is a know-how system, or database, or whatever terminology they use to describe their brain. In reality, they have one — distributed amongst their people — which they often use to spectacular effect. (For examples, see the FT’s report on Innovative Lawyers, which highlights a range of activities — very few (if any) of which depend on the existence of a KM system.)

Often, however, brains (whether individual or organisational) are used spectacularly poorly. I suspect that this is partly why KM databases fail so well: people just use them badly — they don’t use them, or they don’t volunteer their insights to them. (There are other, better, reasons, but I want to concentrate on this one for now.)

How actively do people use their own brains to reflect and learn from their experiences? Or to seek information or insight that challenges what they think they know? I must confess that I see little of this. (I try to do it myself, but I am sure I have blind spots where I accept a partial view of reality, rather than continuing to seek a better truth.) I am sure this critique and creativity happens, but for most people it is concentrated in areas where they are already experts. For lawyers, that is their area of legal expertise — not the work that goes on around them to support the firm in other ways.

As an example of this, consider the know-how system. Whilst the research I linked to above (and again here), dates from 2007, I still see people advocating such repositories as the cure-all for law firms’ knowledge ailments. At the very least, they ought surely to recognise that there is a contrary view and argue against it?

Another example that comes up repeatedly is the assertion that creative thought depends on using one’s right brain, rather than the analytical left brain. However, this depends on an understanding of neuroscience that was undermined twelve years ago. The origin of the left-right brain model was the research of Roger Sperry, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1981. Despite the attractiveness of this model (especially to a range of management authors), neuroscience, like all the sciences, does not stand still — all theories are challengeable.

The watershed year is 1998, when Brenda Milner, Larry Squire, and Eric Kandel published a breakthrough article in the journal Neuron, “Cognitive Neuroscience and the Study of Memory.” Kandel won the Nobel Prize two years later for his contribution to this work. Since then, neuroscientists have ceased to accept Sperry’s two-sided brain. The new model of the brain is “intelligent memory,” in which analysis and intuition work together in the mind in all modes of thought. There is no left brain; there is no right. There is only learning and recall, in various combinations, throughout the entire brain.

Despite the fact that this new model is just as easy to understand, people still fall back on the discredited left-right brain model. Part of the reason, I think, is that they don’t see it as their responsibility to keep up with developments in neuroscience. But surely using 30-year-old ideas about how the brain works brings a responsibility to check every now and then that those ideas are still current.

Something similar happens with urban legends. Here’s a classic KM legend: Stewart Brand on the New College roof beams.

It’s a good story, but not strictly true. In fact the beams had been replaced with pitch pine during the 18th century, the plantation from which the oak came was not planted until a date after the hall was originally built, and forestry practice is such that oak is often available for such a use.

It is not the case that these oaks were kept for the express purpose of replacing the Hall ceiling. It is standard woodland management to grow stands of mixed broadleaf trees e.g., oaks, interplanted with hazel and ash. The hazel and ash are coppiced approximately every 20-25 years to yield poles. The oaks, however, are left to grow on and eventally, after 150 years or more, they yield large pieces for major construction work such as beams, knees etc.

If we rely too heavily on documents and ideas that are familiar (and comfortable), we run the risk of selling ourselves short. As Simon Bostock has recently pointed out, there is almost invariably more interesting stuff in what we have not written down than in what we have captured (or identified as ‘lost knowledge’). Referring to another KM story (NASA have lost the knowledge that would be necessary to get to the moon again), he points out that what was really lost was not the documentation, but the less tangible stuff.

This means, basically, that even if NASA had managed to keep track of the ‘critical blueprints’, they would have been stuffed. Design trade-offs are the stuff of tacit knowledge. Which usually lives inside stories, networks, snippets of shoptalk, chance sneaky peeks at a colleague’s notes, bitter disputes and rivalries…

In knowledge terms, we’re about to live through another Black Death, another NASA-sized readjustment.

Smart organisations will recognise this in advance and avoid the archaeological dig at the junkyard, the museum and the old-folk’s home.

Archaeology is interesting, and can shed light on past and present activities, but we don’t use Grecian urns to keep food in any more. We use new stuff. The new stuff (whatever it might be) should be our continuing focus. That’s how we should use our brains, and how those supporting effective knowledge use should encourage brain-use in their organisations.

He starts:

I have to tell you that coming away from the ARK conference on Knowledge Management, I was a little disappointed with the direction that many of the law firms are taking with the idea of Knowledge Management (KM). Some of the presenters were showing products that were very “flashy” and useful, but weren’t really what I would consider “KM” resources.

Many of them were “Client Services” products… or were fancy dashboards attached to accounting or time and billing resources, but not really what I would think of when it came to capturing “knowledge” at a firm.

And finishes:

The entire conference seemed to be about keeping KM relevant, by expanding the definition of KM and taking it in the direction of Law Practice Management, or Alternative Fees, Accounting and Financial Interfaces, or Client Development Resources. All noble things for a law firm to do… but again, completely outside the scope of what KM was meant to bring to the firm. As Mary Abraham put it in a tweet:

“Why is #KM obsessed with PM? Because desperate knowledge managers are searching for a raison d’être.”

As you can probably tell, I am a little depressed after hearing everyone basically say that in order to stay relevant, you need to abandon most of your objectives and principles and turn KM into something else. I’m hoping that I’m wrong.

There is a lot bundled into Greg’s succinct post, and I want to try and unpack and deal with as much of it as I can here. (I’ll probably fail, but that’s what the comments are for, no?)

The first thing to note is that Greg is absolutely right to crtiticise the use of the ‘knowledge management’ label for activities that are properly the province of other management disciplines. I have always taken the view that there is a place for KM to improve business support functions in law firms (as well as the work of the lawyers themselves). However, if firms’ BD, HR or finance functions find better ways of presenting the information that people need to operate properly, that doesn’t feel to me like a KM project — it feels like an improvement in HR or finance.

The test for ‘KM-ness’ is, I think, similar to a piece of advice for CEOs that I read in one of the HBR blogs a couple of weeks ago.

Top executives usually say they set their priorities and then figure out how to implement them. But in this process many executives make a critical mistake. I’ve noticed this when I’ve mentored new CEOs. They say, “Here are the top five priorities for the company. Who would be the best at carrying out each priority?” Then they come up with themselves as the answer in all five areas. It might be the correct answer, but it’s the wrong question.

The question is not who’s best at performing high-priority functions, but which things can you and only you as the CEO get done? If you don’t ask yourself that question, your time allocations are bound to be wrong. …

…[Y]ou really have to hold yourself back from taking on other functions or tasks even if you might excel at performing them.

The same is true for non-CEOs. So what is it that KM (and only KM) can do? That is the proper focus. So if KMers (from law firms or elsewhere) find themselves presenting at conferences, their material must, I think, be something that could not reasonably fit at a BD, HR, finance, or IT conference.

On the other hand, Greg’s perspective on KM may be a little limited. It isn’t clear from this posting exactly what his definition of proper law firm KM is, but there is a hint in the statement,

these projects were very cool, they were very useful for getting information in the hands of clients or attorneys, but to call them knowledge management resources would be stretching the truth a little bit because they didn’t really capture and reuse existing firm knowledge in the traditional meaning of knowledge management.

This isn’t the place for a debate about the definition of KM, but I think it is important to recognise that ‘capture and re-use of existing knowledge’ doesn’t do justice to the breadth of possible (and justifiable) KM activities. For me, Dave Snowden’s draft definition captures this fairly well:

The purpose of knowledge management is to provide support for improved decision making and innovation throughout the organization. This is achieved through the effective management of human intuition and experience augmented by the provision of information, processes and technology together with training and mentoring programmes.

(As an aside, the comments on Dave’s definition repay close study and reflection, as does the blog post that precedes it.)

However, Greg’s approach to KM is not an unusual one (especially in law firms), and I think there is something to explore here. The conference he attended, “Knowledge Management in the Legal Profession” is a regular event in the Ark Group calendar (as is the equivalent in the UK). Whilst there are similar events that concentrate on KM in specific sectors (notably the public sector), it appears that legal KMers (deliberately or accidentally) tend to dissociate themselves from KM developments in other types of organisation. When I have attended general KM conferences, I have often been noted as a rare legal delegate. If my impression is correct, it is a great shame — I have learned much from my colleagues in law firms, but even more from those in government, industry, commerce and banking. (Sometimes this is a process of learning by distinction — industrial KM is necessarily very different from that in professional services. It is still valuable though.) I think another consequence of a narrow focus could be that conferences on legal KM may run out of clearly KM-related topics so that they start to rely on presentations such as the ones disappointed Greg.

Interestingly, Richard Susskind has a parallel complaint to Greg’s complaint in The End of Lawyers? Susskind remarks at one point in the book (unfortunately, one of my colleagues is reading my copy, so I can’t give a proper quote or reference) that lawyers often talk about the work they do as a form of project management or similar non-legal skill. Susskind finds this odd — why do some lawyers apparently lack confidence in the value of their legal skills? Why, equally, do they think that clients might be interested in paying over the odds for a gifted amateur project manager (albeit with legal skills) rather than a professional project manager who would do a better job (and allow lawyers to focus on their own professional specialisms). Just as some practising lawyers feel they can turn their hands to many different activities, so do many legal KMers. The result is a lack of clarity about what they should actually be specialising in.

A final point. Greg refers to a specific comment that “caught my attention, and made me wonder if KM just needs to be scrapped at law firms altogether.”

When asked about “who” creates the documentation behind a firm’s model documents resource, the answer was that this would be a good opportunity for those in KM who were former practicing attorneys. (Translated: “You’ll need to have someone in KM do this, because no one else in the firm will.”)

I am not sure whether this is a reflection of the lack of value placed on KM, rather than the choices firms make. (And possibly a difference of approach on either side of the Atlantic.) In the UK, at least, law firms have long relied on model documents (otherwise known as precedents or standards). Before we had dedicated KM lawyers, those precedents were drafted by the most experienced (and expert) lawyers in the relevant field. In some teams that is still the case, but now many firms depend on their Professional Support Lawyers to create at least the first draft of the key documents. That is not because the firm values those documents less, but because they have found a more cost-effective way of producing a key resource. I am not sure that US firms have the same dependence on precedents, so they have yet to prove their worth. If that is the case, I imagine that it is probably right for the KM team to take the lead and show the practising lawyers why there is value in model documents. (There is, however, a good case for saying that everyone has a responsibility for KM, just as Larry Hawes recently argued for collaboration and Enterprise 2.0.)

Overall, then I am sympathetic to Greg’s challenge (and we should never be complacent that what we do is unassailable), but I think things may be more complex than he asserts.