Articles Posted in Knowledge Mgt.

Why do corporate lawyers recoil when urged to contribute to knowledge management systems (See my post of June 15, 2006 on obstacles to knowledge contribution.)? At least 11 reasons explain the reluctance, and I have listed them roughly in decreasing order of importance.

Time. To put anything into a knowledge system, or to do anything to support it, takes time. Time is the inside lawyer’s most jealously guarded resource.

Power. If the contributor is the only one who knows how the knowledge, such as how to interpret the export/import rules, why share it and weaken job security?

Lawyers in-house balk when asked to add information to a matter management system, to submit budgets on matters or for their practice group, to evaluate those who report to them, to do status reports, to evaluate outside counsel, to add material to a knowledge management system. They are reluctant to contribute information because “In my world, I know what I need to know.”

Lawyers may understand the collective good, but see little individual benefit (See my posts of March 5, 2005 on altruism not overcoming reluctance to contribute to knowledge management efforts; Dec. 21, 2005 on disappointing levels of contributions to intranets; and April 14, 2005 on erratic evaluations of outside counsel.). The higher a lawyer rises, the valuable becomes the aggregated individual pieces of information.

A German professor, Reinhart Koselleck, published a remarkable lexicon of 115 fundamental sociological concepts. The multi-volume work tracks origins, usage and meaning over time of those core ideas. Concepts such as “revolution,” “state,” “civil society,” “democracy,” and “crisis,” are discussed at length, according to an article in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 67, April 2006 at 345.

I have tried to offer some definitions of terms that are often used in law department management (See my posts of May 3, 2006 with cites to 23 definitions; May 1, 2006 on “value added’; and May 16, 2006 on “chargeable time.”), and now appreciate that concepts have also appeared often in these posts.

Words may be defined but concepts need to be interpreted. Basic concepts in law department management, such as “centralization,” “client satisfaction,” “productivity,” “reporting,” “structure,” and “technology,” ought to be treated as more than meanings of terms that can be unambiguously defined. According to the article, concepts are “inherently controversial and contested,” and law-department management concepts, the ideas that under-gird most of what is involved in running an effective department, share this protean, ideological, and historical fluidity. They deserve discussion, not just definition.

In a piece that describes the convergence program of Schering-Plough, Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 14, May 2006 at 45, the company’s general counsel (Tom Sabatino) explains his expectation of work product sharing. Sabatino looks to his “Core Team,” which will “get somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of all Schering-Plough’s US legal work – excluding patent prosecution work (but including patent litigation.”),” to “share work product on an ongoing basis.”

In a large department, a person could be assigned full time to locating, redacting, and distributing work product among convergence firms. That would be time well spent, would not need to be a lawyer, and would save money.

I have previously written about post mortems, aka after-action reviews (See my posts of Dec. 10, 2005 and April 2, 2005.). Some law departments reflect back on major matters to see what they can glean from them that will help them handle similar matters. Some departments use post mortems to give guidance to business as to what to do to prevent future problems.

I suspect that every lawsuit harbors many lessons for how the business could operate more effectively so that a recurrence becomes less likely. Even if a change in procedure can’t prevent an irrational or nuisance lawsuit, the new way of working might lessen the liability or improve the defenses.

A 10-page screed by the executive search firm BCG aimed at law firm lawyers, as it exposes “several little known facts about going in house that may not necessarily make it the best decision for you.” One of the five plagues unleashed by a move from a law firm to a law department is that “your legal skills are likely to deteriorate once you go in house” (id at 1).

By the lights of BCG, “a large portion of the responsibility of many in house attorneys is to farm out challenging work to the appropriate law firms.” Hence, “it is unlikely you will stay abreast of the law once you are in house because you will have no reason to” (id at 8).

BCG is wrong-headed. In the questions of law that matter to a business, internal lawyers become very specialized. And, equally wrong, the ideal inhouse role is not the potted palm, the roundtable for the trains of outside counsel.

A law department that has its matter management system produce graphics and analyses relies on what is called “business intelligence” software. “BI software extracts data from databases and turns them into human-readable reports,” according to an expert quoted in the Financial Times, Jan. 25, 2006 at S5. BI software uses features such as “data mining, alerts and pattern matching” to make sense out of structured data in databases and spreadsheets.

A law department that uses concept-searching software on its accumulated work product, to find similar agreements for example, relies on a “knowledge management” approach. KM software, as compared to BI software, has its roots in linguistic analysis and aims to help law departments share and apply tacit knowledge. KM software uses taxonomies, semantic rules, sophisticated searching, and fuzzy logic to make sense out of unstructured information such as emails, slides, and memoranda.

I have a bone to pick, and two other bones, with those who expect their law department intranet site to include a directory of resident experts in various areas of law. “If you have a bankruptcy question, call our guru, Rees,” and that kind of listing.

Much like many lawyers reluctantly add documents to a knowledge repository, because it feels arrogant to claim that the document is worthy of recognition and widespread reliance, they shy away from being described as an “expert.”

Bone two is that many lawyers know quite a bit about an area, for example export compliance, but they may not want to be tagged as a SME (subject matter expert) where a colleague could plausibly lay claim to that exalted status, because of the poor reaction of the competitive colleague.

The law departments of many mature, large companies may well rely on lawyers whose age averages 48 or more. At that age, retirement beckons only a few years away. According to an Accenture study in 2005 of 1,400 workers aged between 40 and 50, companies have woefully failed to memorialize their experience (Fin. Times, Jan. 25, 2006 at SR 1). “Nearly four in 10 respondents said their organizations did not have a formal process and/or tools for capturing their workplace knowledge.”

The loss of highly-valued skills and knowledge as baby-boom lawyers reach retirement age ought to worry law department managers. Those managers need to train successors, gather material that is online and searchable, post guidelines, interview the experienced, prepare outside counsel, train clients, and consider retaining them after retirement.