A theme of this blog is that the "default" approach to
issues in law firm management should be that much can be learned from
the enormous literature on corporate management. In other words,
barring unusual circumstances unique to the profession (which
always includes the sui generis cultural identity of a law firm),
the dynamics of law firm management are not utterly distinct from
the dynamics of a like-sized corporation in a high-end service business. So
when an outfit like McKinsey writes
about knowledge management for companies,
it’s presumably worth a read to see what light it shines on KM for law
firms.
Characteristically—and I believe, correctly—McKinsey approaches
the challenge of KM with a market-driven mindset. That is, treat
the exchange of knowledge within a firm as a marketplace, albeit one
with idiosyncratic features, and use what we know about the power of
markets to drive KM. Specifically:
- The "supply" of knowledge comes from smart people providing their
distinctive expertise. - Those people, in turn, must be recognized for their contributions
above and beyond their passive peers. - And they must get credit (their intellectual property must be respected);
nothing is more demoralizing to a junior person than to see a senior
take credit for their ideas. - Senior management must get conspicuously behind the creation and
upkeep of the KM marketplace.
At the KC Forum I blogged here
recently, a fascinating side "conversation" was on how UK and US firms
approach KM differently: Essentially, UK firms are people-intensive (having
dedicated lawyers draft model documents, e.g.) and US firms are technology-intensive
(search, taxonomies, and meta-tagging, e.g.). Which side
does McKinsey come down on? Both. They call for a small team
(two dozen people for a "large investment bank") to fulfill roles such
as editor, "knowledge domain owner," and quality assurance, while at
the same time confirming the virtue of effective and targeted technology
(for example, deeming it a meaningful success to reduce the number of
searches required to find a pertinent document from 5 to 1.2).
But isn’t there a chicken and egg problem with launching any KM marketplace? To
wit, what user will go to a KM repository that has little content and
what supplier will write for a repository that has no users? Interestingly,
if McKinsey knows whereof they speak, it takes as few as 700—1,000
documents to achieve critical mass. Has your firm got, say, that
many briefs lying around?
Yeah, I thought so.
