Law Department Management Blog
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.