The Holy Grail of assembling the most potent and effective team for
a client matter is, simply put, to have the right people in the right
place at the right time. Wal-Mart (and other companies like Toyota)
have achieved this with inventory and supplies; what stands in the way
of achieving a similar high-productivity, high-delivery-level miracle
with people? After all, in a knowledge organization such as a law
firm, talent is your inventory.
Of course, all talent is by no means equal, so to prepare the groundwork
for "human capital management" means identifying and grouping your people
by their subject-matter expertise and their level of experience. In
a law firm, much of this work is essentially done: "senior corporate
partner," e.g., says pretty much all you need to know. But
other distinctions are fuzzier, and worth taking the time to delineate. For
example, when is a "senior securities associate" more appropriate for
a financing deal than a "junior asset-backed finance partner"?
Again, our friends at McKinsey have
done a yeoman job of laying it out. Patterns may emerge that cause you
to re-think how you’ve always done things. McKinsey offers the
example of a $100-million/year "corporate law firm" with undue attrition
among senior associates, causing, in turn, an increase in writeoffs. If
it were to turn out that many of the departed, disgruntled associates
had been working on a particular class of deals with a particular handfull
of partners, that case-assignment pattern could be broken.
So can you run out and buy this software? Not quite yet; McKinsey
estimates another year to 18 months before it shows up in any form remotely resembling off the shelf. But considering that it addresses
the absolutely indispensable core of your competitive distinction—your
talented lawyers—you should be thinking about it now.
Here is a case where it is worth considering that you tend to find what you’re looking for, not so much what’s available. But what if the available stuff is more valuable than what you’re looking for?
KM in the legal domain necessarily must grapple with how to research “unstructured” data versus structured data(think narrative information as opposed to data bases).
But that’s not enough, because there must also be research by “formed” or formatted data – namely, certain classifications of docmentation, as opposed to certain classes of data.
The real question in practical KM is this: if data can be discovered and acquired, will the firm take the steps to document the data, and will classified data get put into classified documents? This last question points to a many-to-many relationship for which control finds housekeeping (motivation) on one side, scribes and technology in the middle(opportunity), and business innovation (motivation) on the other side. To get a grip on what in this spectrum can be done with technology, visit the folks at Tacit Knowledge, a very content-wise California company.