A recent study of knowledge management during new product development identified 14 techniques [46 MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Spring 2005, pg 5]. Each technique has something to contribute when law departments want to learn and share the learning more effectively.
The 10 highest-rated methods for sharing knowledge were, in order:
A company called Clear Direction (www.cleardirection.com) offers an online instrument, the Hartman-Kinsel Profile, that provides “a personalized report describing the unique thinking characteristics that successful attorneys possess.” When you complete the Profile, which takes about 20 minutes, you get a lengthy report explaining your style of thinking and you also get a six month e-mail based development program.
I took the Profile for another purpose and found the results to be moderately insightful. (I like psychometric tests such as Meyers-Briggs, Kolbe Conative, Graves, Caliper, FIRO-B, and others.) The more lawyers grasp their own and others’ cognitive styles, the more effective and satisfied they can be.
A law department that ventures into knowledge management will progress more rapidly if its lawyers understand their patterns of relating to information. If they have more tolerance for differences between them and other lawyers, it will help them understand how information can be variously but effectively stored, accessed, and massaged.
In-house lawyers are loathe to share information. Just think about why it has proved so hard to keep intranet sites current, or why resistance develops to populating case management systems, why KM remains a chimera with little popular support. The reason is that lawyers do not want to take the time to make what they know available to other lawyers. Altruistic information sharing has too little payoff, it seems to most lawyers, even though the logic seems compelling for posting information: if everyone does it, the result is richer. Blogs too suffer from the same reluctance of lawyers to offer their thoughts. Many many more people read blogs than comment on them. (On the other hand, with millions of blogs gushing away, maybe my point fails.)
Law departments struggle with these compilations of information because lawyers do not want to expose their ideas – lest they be criticized, perhaps; or they claim they do not have time, which really means that they do not see the payoff justifying their effort; or they are hobbled by technology, even down to the simple point of not being able to type proficiently.
One way to circumvent this obstacle is to assign lawyers responsibility for developing content. Don’t leave it voluntary. Another is to acquire enough material from other sources so that when someone searches among the entries, they are rewarded with a needle – and that spurs them to contribute to the haystack. A third technique is to let software comb through documents and emails and weave it into gold (love those metaphors).
Law Department Management Blog