Are lawyers convinced by KM?

Back in 1998, I wrote in my book Legal Practice in the Digital Age that: “Knowledge-management systems are not only set to become the next big thing in the quest for the killer app but will also subsequently prove to be a huge waste of money, as well as a wrecker of reputations, hopes and expectations.” Richard Susskind, in his book Transforming the Law, echoed this view when he warned firms to ignore the know-how trap “as a holy grail that will never be achieved”. Now fast forward six years and has anything happened to convince this doubting Thomas that law firms really have got to grasp with the concept of KM?

Cynic though I may be, there has been progress. For example, most firms and system vendors have finally grasped that KM is not an IT problem that can be solved simply by installing a powerful search engine – what is sometimes called the “big software” approach. Derek Sturdy of Tikit Granite & Comfrey can take a lot of the credit for tirelessly hammering home the message that KM is not document management because 99.5 per cent of documents are not knowledge, but merely transactional materials and routine correspondence. In fact, Sturdy thinks that even larger firms will find that practice wide, their whole knowledge-management databases probably involve no more than 2,000 to 4,000 documents.

Six years on and there is also a far wider acceptance of what KM is and is not about. For example, it is not about internal procedural documents, nor is it about common knowledge – such as that already produced by legal publishers. It is, however, about best practice, so lawyers approaching a piece of work can be certain of doing it right every time because they can draw upon proven precedents and reliable guides as to when and how to use those precedents. It is about tacit knowledge – what is between the lawyers’ ears – as well as more explicit knowledge, such as that found in document templates. And it is also about non-legal KM – what Sturdy calls “client specific wrinkles” – as well as purely legal issues.

But, while there has been progress in many areas – in fact, some firms are actually allocating halfway decent budgets to spend on PSAs and library staff to further their KM initiatives – there remains a nagging doubt that many partners have still to be convinced that KM is a viable business strategy for them.

Telling a lawyer that the firm needs to capture their know-how in case they fall under a bus may only make them think that if replicating their skills is that simple, why should they co-operate with the project? After all, it will only make it easier for them to be laid off when times are hard and the firm needs to economise. However, the biggest stumbling block seems to be the prevalence of the billable-hours culture. With the profession still obsessed with clocking up chargeable time, where is the incentive for anyone to take time out of fee earning today, so that tomorrow they will spend less time handling a piece of work?

There is a major cultural issue to address when it comes to getting a genuine buy-in from lawyers. But that would be a lot easier to achieve if firms had more flexible-billing strategies that made it commercially attractive for lawyers to buy into KM. There is no shortage of suggestions on how this could be done, from paying lawyers “royalties” when anyone uses one of their precedents, to moving over to fixed fees, where KM has the potential to greatly improve profit margins – it just needs someone brave enough to do it.

Charles Christian is editor of the Legal Technology Insider newsletter.