I used to believe that law departments should disseminate answers to frequently-asked questions, post legal guidance for hypotheticals, and share with clients responses to questions that might arise again, all contributing to the good of capturing and spreading knowledge (Is creating good by capturing knowledge “salutary confinement?”). Now disabused of…
A short piece by David Gilmour in the Harvard Business Review (Oct. 2003 at pgs. 16-17) makes the case for abandoning the “publish” model for KM – collect information from people and broadcast it – in favor of collaborative knowledge sharing based on “brokering.” With brokering, a law department needs…
Responding to a survey, the ever-creative Bruce McEwan rated the following methods from one (most effective) to five (least effective) for fostering contributions by law firm partners to a KM system. (See my post of today on brokering knowledge, instead of publishing.) Technique/Incentive ………………………………………………………………..Partners A one-time incentive or reward ……………………………………………………….4…
A large company that swallowed a succession of smaller companies during the past 10 years ended up keeping about half of the lawyers it acquired. One might assume that the 50% loss of institutional knowledge would hamstring those who remained. Not true. Clearing out veterans, to the contrary, could be…
If you understand the relative effectiveness of different modes of transferring knowledge, you can more effectively boost the performance of your lawyers. In Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom, co-authors Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap describe five modes of knowledge transfer, which range from passive reception…
The excellent book, Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom, by Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap, discusses methods of training along two poles: trainer centered to learner centered and passing on knowledge to passing on skills. Here are the eight methods, from the most trainer and knowledge…
Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap explain in Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom (Harv. Bus. School 2005, pg. 49) that “most evidence suggests that it takes at least ten years of concentrated study and practice to become an expert (as opposed to merely competent).” Assuming the…
The loss of experience, judgment, social networks, and cohesion when a veteran retires can wound a legal department. Most of what that lawyer contributed leaves at retirement, locked away in the retiree’s brain as tacit knowledge. What can a general counsel do to staunch the retirement loss? Have the veteran…
A small entry in the May 2005 Metropolitan Corporate Counsel (pg. 65) announced that Synthetix ®, software from Syngence LLC, is a “search method which ‘thinks’ just as a human would to determine the meaning of passages … of text.” The announcement focused on using the software on testimony from…
In mid-2003, the Legal Technology Institute at the Univ. of Florida’s College of Law collected survey responses from 348 corporate law departments and outside law firms. The article summary mentioned document management and e-mail search applications as examples of KM [www.merrillcorp.com/solutions/lawfirms/article_legalstudy/htm] The article summary exclaimed that “[o]ne of the more…