Profile: Stephen Perry

Manju Manglani talks to pioneer Steve Perry about his experiences in knowledge sharing and the future of knowledge management for law firms.

Knowledge management has come a long way since Steve Perry set up Ashurst’s word-processing centre in the early 1980s. Known then as information management, it involved digitising standard contracts, which lawyers at the silver-circle firm could only access by sending in a request to the WP centre.

A decade later, Perry was creating the first practice group intranet for KPMG, one of the ‘big four’ audit firms.

“I did a lot of ‘winging it’ in the early days as there was nothing to go on,” reflects Perry who, within the space of five years, had become a senior knowledge manager at KPMG. “I just started out and some things worked and some didn’t, but it was a very exciting time.”

Perry then went on to join the accounting firm’s UK knowledge management group to create a nationwide intranet for information sharing.

“I am a business KM person so my contribution was in working with senior management, understanding their strategy, and then being able to make knowledge happen for them,” says Perry. “We had good fun setting it up.”

When KPMG decided to develop an overall global knowledge sharing system, known as K-World, Perry was asked to join the team. Then, in 2000, he designed and led a programme for a secure global extranet across all key clients. This was creatively named K-Client.

Legal intranets

In the mid 1990s, the ‘big four’ accounting firms were pioneering new forms of knowledge-sharing through intranets. However, many law firms were still in the early stages of the process.

“Law firms were beginning to think about KM, but many had only just begun to set up intranets and were simply looking at them as document management systems,” says Perry. “The accounting firms were ahead of the law firms, they were definitely pioneering and in the leading position in professional services.”

In 2007, Perry was approached by a headhunter to join magic-circle firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer as the head of knowledge and business development systems. He had the task of revolutionising the UK firm’s approach to knowledge sharing.

“When I arrived in September 2007, there were some big challenges. They had a very poor intranet, it was based on FrontPage and just dire,” comments Perry.

A central know-how system had been set up and achieved a great deal, “but the user interface wasn’t very good, the search wasn’t very good, it wasn’t stable and it was very wobbly”, says Perry.

“No one was using it and fee-earner feedback was that they could never find anything on it, so that was my number-one priority.”

Perry set himself the challenge of bringing the firm’s intranet into web 2.0, using wikis, blogs, micro-blogging tools, and RSS feeds. He also had to reduce fee-earners’ reliance on support staff, including secretaries and professional support lawyers, as part of senior management’s strategy of cost-cutting. This required providing intuitive tools which “even partners” could use, says Perry.

He decided to use leading enterprise collaboration and wiki software Confluence, and developed the law firm’s whole intranet based on the Wikipedia concept of editable pages.

“I came up with something called ‘tight-loose’, where there were some things which I held onto tightly, such as the overall branding and high-level taxonomy, and then I was loose in terms of letting people do what they wanted with it,” reflects Perry. “I wanted the separate sector, client service and practice group team pages to have their own flavour, and to encourage ownership of content so that it was current and fresh and fee-earners were contributing to it.”

However, not all of Freshfields’ offices bought into Perry’s new intranet. “The Germans were as open to it as the Brits, but other countries struggled with it. The French didn’t want to buy into it, they didn’t want to know, it was an uphill struggle,” says Perry. “I think it was because of the cultural aspects of knowledge sharing and collaboration.”

Sharing knowledge

A key issue facing law firms is that those lower in the ranks are not always comfortable with contributing to the firm’s knowledge bank.

“I think equity partners are quite collaborative because they are in it together,” says Perry. “At a junior level, they have grown up with social networking tools and have helped each other during training courses, so they’re happy to collaborate within their own network or small group.”

However, getting junior lawyers to record their views for partners to see is a challenge. “The question is how to get them to have the confidence to do that and keep partners from ridiculing them,” says Perry. “For the occasional one which isn’t very good, you’ll get lots of great insights and comments.”

Another sensitive issue is senior associates, who are not always willing to share their insights with their peers in case it cost them a competitive advantage, says Perry. “They are climbing up the greasy pole and need to project their own knowledge, expertise and uniqueness to the partnership to get a winning seat.”

The key is to weed out individuals who think knowledge is power, and then to ensure knowledge-sharing activities are recognised and rewarded, says Perry. “Lawyers need to know that it’s career-enhancing to share what they know, and I think law firms are paying a bit of lip service to this in their way of measuring and monitoring staff.”

It’s not just technology

One of Perry’s bugbears is that KM is often still seen as a technology solution. “People are the most important, process is next, content is after that, and technology-enabling tools are last,” says Perry.

“But people often turn that on its head, particularly in the US, where they have always been focused on technology and think that if they get that right, everything will just happen,” he says. “And that’s why some US firms are pretty poor at KM, because they don’t get knowledge sharing or collaboration going properly.”

The focus must be on end-user-generated content, says Perry. Solutions and approaches to KM should be user-centric and intuitively designed. “You shouldn’t need training to use it – people should be able to just sit down and start playing with it and get to where they want,” he adds.

Information overload

However, the constant interruption factor as a result of too much information has resulted in a decrease in lawyer productivity, says Perry.

“The younger generation are like nervous grasshoppers all the time with their iPhone web browsing and emails, and I do worry about lawyer productivity when they are flitting between so many different things, that they’re not getting the documents drafted in the most efficient way.”

The digital revolution has resulted in a whole new issue for knowledge sharing efforts at law firms. “I think we need to make it shorter and sharper, with micro-blogging in 140 characters or less,” says Perry. “We need to have a pyramid structure, with short snippets and wikis at the top which point you to more information at a lower level. And we need to move away from expecting lawyers to search endlessly through document management systems.”

Enterprise search is another area which needs to be developed further to accommodate the differing needs of different generations within a law firm, says Perry. “Senior lawyers love browsing, with trees that expand and a browsing navigation route, but junior lawyers love a Google-type search box.”

The challenge therefore is for knowledge managers to prioritise documents based on how high they should appear in the internal search results, with the most important files listed on the first page, says Perry, “because if you can’t get them on your first page you are struggling; very rarely do you get people looking at page two or three in the search results”.

Since November 2009, Steve Perry has taken on an independent advisory role. He recently advised Denton Wilde Sapte on the global pilot of its knowledge-sharing social business strategy.

Top Tips for KM Success

1) Remember the basics. The four cornerstones of KM are people, process, content and technology – in that order – says Perry. “Although there are new names and badges being put on different solutions, tools and approaches, remember these basics and that ultimately your adoption and take-up is the acid test of whether you’ve been successful or not.”

2) Make it user-friendly. Always remember to keep the design of your KM solution usable and user-centric, to help adoption. “If you are always thinking about these two things, you stand a good chance of coming up with something that works,” notes Perry.

3) Embrace social media. “Don’t think social media tools are frivolous and just for personal lives, take the lessons of Facebook, Twitter, wikis, and blogs, and adapt them to your own firm.” You don’t have to implement an internal Facebook or Twitter, but think about what’s right for your firm, says Perry.

4) Be strategic. Always align your KM activities to support and held deliver your firm’s strategic goals, recommends Perry. Avoid the hype over new trends and technologies, and instead “look at what your firm is doing and make sure you understand the strategy and where it’s going”. This will ensure support from senior management, because KM can be the enabler in delivering strategy.

“The strategy is easy for senior management to bring together because they can then pin it up, have some slides and say this is what we’re doing and where we’re going,” he suggests.

“But they need something and someone to make it happen, to embed it, to make it roll. KM is ideal for this because it’s all about sharing knowledge and expertise across firm-wide boundaries.”