Being a Cost Center in Difficult Economic Times

It's budget season in many law firms. If that weren't bad enough, we're preparing budgets against the backdrop of disturbing economic news. And worst of all, most law firm knowledge management departments are cost centers. What are you going to do?

Traditionally, there have been two approaches to dealing with difficult economic times: cut costs and grow revenue. As you plan your budget for 2009, chances are you have been asked to take a serious look at your costs. In a recent APQC KM poll, 44% of respondents expected to cut their KM budgets in 2009, 35% expected to hold the line on their budget and a fortunate 22% expected a slight increase (1%-9%) in their 2009 budget.** The reality is that even holding the line requires great discipline with respect to costs, so fully 79% of the respondents will be extremely cost sensitive in 2009.

Cutting costs in knowledge management programs requires close scrutiny of your KM operations. Do you have the right mix of staff? Are your KM projects aligned with your firm's business strategy? Is each staff member engaged in the right mix of projects? And, is their work being done in the most cost effective way possible? Once you can answer yes to all of these questions, you've probably done all you can do with respect to sensible cost cutting.

If cutting costs is tough, growing the revenue of the KM department can be even tougher. It may be possible for KM staff to get involved in client billable work, but chances are that the billable work will at best account for only a small fraction of total time spent. So how about helping grow the revenue of the firm? Now we're onto something interesting. As you think about implementing KM projects that enhance fee-earning capability, first see if you can identify activities for which there is a direct line between KM efforts and revenue. (We've talked before about the challenges of KM ROI, but that doesn't absolve us from the responsibility of looking for ROI opportunities.) These opportunities can run the gamut from improving realization rates (by maximizing the value of the services rendered) to helping to develop new client services or new market share. Regardless of which revenue enhancing strategies you pursue, be sure that at the planning stage you identify appropriate metrics and methods for tracking KM's contribution to the top line. Too many successful KM programs have gone unnoticed by law firm management because knowledge managers failed to institute a reliable approach to metrics early in the life of the program.

Over the course of the next 18 months, we will be hearing stories of firms that managed (seemingly against the odds) to turn in good results. Pay particular attention to those cases where smart knowledge management made a difference. Hopefully, your firm will be one of those success stories.


(** I've reproduced the numbers faithfully, even though they add up to 101%.)

You Get What You Measure

You get what you measure. This isn't news -- first you decide what you want to achieve and then you design your metrics to let you know when you've arrived. That's good practice and it's the message of my earlier post, The Metrics Mess. Simple stuff, right? Wrong. You'd be amazed how often folks misunderstand where true success lies and, therefore, collect metrics that drive them in the wrong direction.

Let's take the example of the typical law firm. How does it define success? Profits per partner? Long-term client relationships? Employee attrition? Recruiting rates? The reality is that there are many bases on which to judge success. So, what do firms typically choose to track? Billable hours. When you track hours, you send the unmistakable signal that you are interested in time -- lots of time. After all, time spent equals money. However, where in that equation is the notion that time spent well is worth more than money? At the end of the day, you know the cost of the time spent. But, do you know the value to the firm or, more importantly, to the client?

If we defined success as delivering high-value services to clients, what would we track? If we defined success as building value within the firm as an institution, what would we track?

For law firm knowledge management, the issue of metrics is a persistent problem. We've chased various ways of trying to prove return on investment, but with little success. What should we track to show how our efforts provide value to clients and to the firm itself? Until we've conquered this challenge, we can't expect to achieve any real measure of permanence within a law firm. And, that's a problem when the economy is heading south.

Aspiring to KM Geekdom

While I don't have a snowball's chance in any place warm of ever achieving geekdom, I couldn't resist testing my abilities against Gizmodo's The 50 Skills Every Geek Should Have. I flunked -- but I'm not too worried. In fact, I suspect that I'm in pretty good company.

That said, I do sometimes wonder what a comparable list for knowledge managers would contain. To do our work well, we need a strange mix of technical and people skills, as well as substantive legal knowledge if you're working in the world of law firms, for example. So here's my first stab at a list for knowledge management -- in no particular order:

1. Superior listening skills
2. Empathy
3. The ability to translate from user speak to "geek speek"
4. Skills in organizing chaos
5. Analytical ability
6. Superior persuasive writing and speaking skills
7. No tendency to technophobia
8. Deep knowledge of human nature
9. Openmindedness
10. A willingness to plan cooperatively via an iterative process rather than imposing solutions
11. Basic kindergarten competence (i.e., plays nicely with others, doesn't run with scissors, etc.)
12. Ability to build strong and productive teams
13. Creativity
14. An understanding of database configuration and functionality
15. An understanding of social computing
16. An understanding of law firm (or your industry's) economics
17. ?

What would you add? What would you omit? Why?

Is Your KM Department Serving Fish?

Have you ever heard an administrator say that their department could fulfill its mission without additions to headcount? Yet in this economy, more and more administrators are going to be told that they must meet their institutional obligations with a smaller staff. Before we let panic overtake us, let's spend a moment thinking about the wonderful opportunity this mandate presents. Necessity drives us to think critically about our mission, how we've chosen to tackle it and how we've chosen to staff it. In these last few years of feasting, many have become bloated. Now we have to rethink our approach.

Rather than thinking small, let's blow up the model and start again. What would you do if you could afford only a knowledge management department of one? What would you have that person do? Suddenly, routine chores that consume so much time and effort are much less justifiable. Equally, expending energy on projects that benefit relatively few is short-sighted. So, for example, instead of grinding away at database maintenance chores of marginal value what high-impact project would you tackle? In the context of law firm knowledge management, drafting a model document that might be used occasionally by a relatively small group of lawyers becomes less compelling. So does working on a lawyer's pet technology project, unless the resulting opportunity cost is one the firm is prepared to tolerate. Instead, spending time to train lawyers to filter and organize the flood of information that comes to their computers daily so that they and their colleagues can find this material efficiently makes much more sense. So does giving them centrally-accessible places to store and exchange the tribal lore that sets the great law firms apart from their competitors. In each case, you make individual lawyers self-reliant and leverage the efforts of one to benefit many.

In the language of economic development, this is about teaching people to fish so that they can sustain themselves over the long-term rather than handing them fish for a single meal. In the days of plenty, we could afford a large knowledge management staff to find the fish and serve it to hungry lawyers. Things have changed now and everyone will have to know how to do their own fishing. Are you and your firm prepared for this?

Ask and You Shall Receive via Enterprise Microblogging

A lot of electronic ink has been spilled on the possibility of adapting microblogging technology for use behind the firewall. As with other social media tools, the ability of many to imagine enterprise uses for microblogging (or microsharing or microlearning) has been constrained by their encounters with the microblogging tools some of us have learned to love in our leisure hours such as Twitter. A casual visitor to Twitter sees lots of social interchanges and some downright inane ones, and wonders in their skepticism if this is a plague that should be inflicted on their law firm. (Included in the mix is plenty of useful work-related information, as well as recommendations for reading** and for life, but a casual observer may not notice those right away.) Others will say, given the existing worries about of information overload, we should not add to the pressure by exposing law firm employees to loads of trivia.

As with most things, we know what we know and don't know what we don't know.

For those of us in need of having our vision expanded a little on this topic, I'd recommend you take a look at a terrific piece in Fast Company by Marcia Conner entitled Enterprise Micro-Learning. In it she provides lots of examples of how these tools could improve social conditions and business productivity within an enterprise. For knowledge management folks, there is a gem in that article that is worth thinking about a little further:

Too frequently organizational knowledge-sharing mirrors the news-cycle society around us, in which we share the highs and lows, ignoring the ordinary stuff in the middle. It's in that middle ground people make sense of the work done around them, understand how we can play a part to help fulfill the vision, and know where we can turn to find the help we need. It's the middle stuff that's truly interesting and helps us connect with one another.

She is absolutely right. For many, law firm knowledge management is about capturing and sharing the "high value items" such best practices and models. In most cases, we don't have the time or tools to handle the items from any other part of the spectrum and allow requests for those to clutter e-mail or go unfulfilled. Yet, it is those requests for the "ordinary stuff" that actually allow folks within the law firm to work more easily and productively. Enterprise microblogging could fill this need.

And what about the information overload issue? To begin with, unlike e-mail, the user can choose with laser-like precision from whom they would like to hear (or "follow" in Twitter speak). So, you get to put together your own cabinet of advisers: perhaps the partner from the capital markets (or bankruptcy) practice to shed light on current economic conditions + the savvy junior associate who is completely plugged in + the person who makes great recommendations regarding what's good to eat in the law firm cafeteria. In addition, there are technologies emerging (such as TweetDeck) to help you filter what could be a constant stream of inputs. With these tools, you can decide whom you'd like to follow and how you'd like to group those folks. So each user could create, for example, a practice-focused group, a client or matter focused group, an economy alert group, a firms news group (including your cafeteria advisor), a collection of lawyers in your affinity group, etc. With this structure in place, you could then follow at any particular time the group that is most pertinent for your work or life.

Microblogging presents lots of possibilities for productivity and for building community within your law firm. Don't make the mistake of discounting this technology just because you haven't yet had an opportunity to broaden your experience and vision with social media tools.

[**I discovered Marcia Conner's article through a tweet by noted social media industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang.]

The Firm of the Future

Whether you agree with its conclusions or not, you owe it to yourself to read Ronald J. Baker's article in the November 2008 issue of the Journal of Accountancy. That article, The Firm of the Future, makes an interesting case for moving beyond leveraging people hours to leveraging intellectual capital. According to Baker, the formula for success of the Firm of the Past is:

Revenue = People Power x Efficiency x Hourly Rate

Baker argues that we should move away from this tired approach to the formula for success of the Firm of the Future:

Profitability = Intellectual Capital x Effectiveness x Price

In highlighting the contrasts between the two systems, Baker notes:

Micromanagement of knowledge workers is the culture of most firms. Tracking time in six-minute increments, measuring productivity, measuring efficiency, and measuring relative worth all are driven by time sheets. The management attitude that anything that is not billable is not worthwhile has destroyed the intellectual pursuit of knowledge and self-improvement that is critical to the long-term success of every professional knowledge firm.

The examples cited in this article are drawn from the world of accounting, but the parallels to the law firm world are close enough to allow them to be a reasonable proxy. Both professions have come to value headcount and efficiency as the most reliable means to success. In the process, they attempt to sell clients "time," despite the fact that clients are looking to buy solutions not time. From that mismatch comes a persistent disagreement as to the true value of the solutions clients want. By contrast, Baker argues that the real source of wealth in the Firm of the Future is intellectual capital. When the firm is in the business of selling its unique intellectual capital coupled with practical applications of that knowledge, then it is finally offering something clients value.

In his scheme, intellectual capital is not just the knowledge of the firm's workers. Rather, intellectual capital has three components, all of which need to be nurtured in order for the Firm of the Future to realize its potential and be successful:

- human capital (i.e., the knowledge of its people)
- structural capital (i.e., its systems, software, tools and resources that allow it to perform work)
- social capital (e.g., clients, firm reputation, vendor relationships, referral sources, alumni, alliances, networks, etc.)

The implications of this new approach are marvelous for both knowledge workers and knowledge management. With respect to knowledge workers, focusing on intellectual capital and effectiveness encourages managers and knowledge workers alike to value learning and the sensible application of that learning to client problems. This in turn sets the stage for personal growth, creativity and innovation.

The focus on intellectual capital and effectiveness also puts a premium on the tools and methods of knowledge management that facilitate the growth and sharing of knowledge, and assist knowledge workers to improve their personal effectiveness. In one fell swoop, that pesky question of knowledge management ROI becomes a little less elusive.

Ron Friedmann and others have long argued that it would be healthier for firms and clients alike to move to fixed fee or value billing rather than hourly billing. And, advocates of this approach have looked to clients to insist on it. Thus far, few clients have exercised the necessary muscle to bring about this change. However, given the current economic climate, the stars may be aligning in such a way as to make this new approach more plausible and thus more possible.

[Thanks to Dennis Kennedy's dkennedyblog posts on Twitter for pointing out this article.]

KM and Ad Hoc Communities

National Public Radio is experimenting with new ways of using social media tools to involve their audience in the creation of live radio shows. One of the most recent examples is their effort to form ad hoc communities, as demonstrated by the new wikis related to the Brian Lehrer Show's 30 Issues in 30 Days series. This is how these wikis are described:

Each Friday throughout the series, we're doing a "30 Issues Wiki." For these six segments, we've created an easily edited page where you can collaborate with others to help produce the segment. On this page you'll be able to suggest angles; do research; write copy and questions; suggest guests; and suggest audio to be included in the on-air segment. In other words, you'll do everything a normal Brian Lehrer Show producer does every day.

Through social media, listeners of this popular talk radio show were invited to collaborate in the creation of specific broadcasts. For example, a group of listeners spontaneously came together in an ad hoc community to consider how best to frame the issues for a broadcast entitled "Drill Baby Drill?: Oil vs Alternative Energy." In the days leading to the broadcast, they edited a wiki page that reflected their concerns and points of view. Then the collaborative work of this group was transformed into a radio show that was broadcast on October 10 and is available for you to hear now. These folks may never meet and may never collaborate again. But for a brief moment in time, they came together to create something useful.

An ad hoc community can also be triggered by breaking news, such as catastrophes. This is another instance in which the news media can use its natural strengths to initiate greater participation by its audience, thereby turning that audience into a group of citizen journalists. In the post The Power of Portals: Ad-Hoc Communities we learn,

Ad hoc communities primarily emerge for the purpose of information dissemination; thus, news portals are the perfect environment to foster such communities.
[...]
Ad hoc networks need to be low involvement and facilitate information exchange. As they are short lived and focus on time sensitive events, ad hoc communities could be a great way to extend the reach and increase the value of content.

Now let's take the concept of ad hoc community and translate it into the environment of law firm knowledge management. During the economic upheavals of the last few weeks, how has your law firm's KM group or IT department responded? The press has reported that lawyers in various firms have formed ad hoc communities to act as economic crisis response teams. Have the KM departments in those firms provided adequate tools to support those response teams? Are there RSS feeds to supply the latest news and commentary? Are there wiki pages to collect each team's analysis and learning? Are there blogs to record their Q&A and market updates? Or are these teams struggling to get by on e-mail and static HTML pages on their firm intranets?

The beauty of social media tools is that they are wonderfully flexible and easy to use. Once the platform is in place, the users can dive right in to create and organize the content in a manner that is useful and appropriate to their needs without much (if any) administrative support. For knowledge managers looking for an opportunity to demonstrate the power and utility of social media tools, you may not need to look any further than the current economic crisis.

Using the Right Map

In these days of Google Maps and Mapquest, it can be hard to remember that you actually do need to use different kinds of maps for different kinds of journeys. Members of my family have on more than one occasion rescued sailor wannabees who made the mistake of renting a boat for the day and then tried to navigate with the assistance of only a road map. (It's true. You can't make this stuff up.)

A similar situation has sprung up around the conversation Venkatesh Rao started regarding what he viewed as the Social Media vs Knowledge Management battle for the soul of users. He used a specific map (generalizations about generational differences) to navigate the discussion. This map led him to his desired destination: KM is doomed to fail because it is championed by the rapidly aging and completely misguided Baby Boomer generation. By contrast, he believes that SM will prevail because it is championed by Millenials, who are as we speak defining the new dominant ways of interacting online.

Venkat has posted a response to the reactions of this blog and others. I suspect this discussion isn't over yet, but I would make the following observation: generalizations about generational differences are just that -- generalizations. It's like using the map the car rental company provides when you really need a detailed road atlas. The generalizations can help orient you (maybe), but you're unlikely to reach your destination without the necessary detailed analysis.

In the case of law firm knowledge management, it's probably fine to start your analysis regarding your chances of launching social media tools with the generational map provided by Venkat. However, generalizations set in abstract situations are no better than that car rental company map. You need to know the topography of your particular firm. How exactly do the employees in your firm fit within the generational boundaries -- as determined by date of birth AND by preferences? Despite the chronological facts, do you have a firm culture that is adventurous when it comes to technology? Despite the generational distribution, does your firm have a tightwad culture, making any investment in new social media tools difficult? Has your firm taken on so many financial obligations that it doesn't have the necessary economic cushion to weather the current market turmoil, much less launch a new way of working online?

As you can see, most of these questions have very little to do with the age of the employees of your law firm, but the answers can have a profound influence on the discussion and ultimate decision regarding social media in your firm. As you head down this path, be sure you are equipped with more than generalizations. Otherwise, I can virtually guarantee that you will get lost.

Virtual Water Coolers

In times of high anxiety, people seek ways to get information, commiserate with fellow sufferers, test rumors and gain perspective. Traditionally, this happened in the office around the proverbial water cooler. However, in this new age of BYOBW (i.e., bring your own bottled water), there are fewer water coolers in offices. And, with the recent uptick in telecommuting, there are fewer hours in a shared physical space.

So where do you go during regular business hours for companionship, comfort and anxiety-busting info when there's no water cooler? E-mail is a possibility, but it's a poor way to build community. Google is another option. It provides access to lots of information, but no personal interaction and little context.

While law firm knowledge management programs tend to focus on projects that directly affect client services, you might consider creating an effective virtual water cooler as a more general means of improving the business of your firm. The obvious way to do this is to deploy social media tools behind the firewall to strengthen a sense of community, enhance employee morale and provide an easily accessible forum for the exchange of information. While this information may not always relate directly to any specific client matter, it can go a long way to containing and diminishing anxiety levels. This, in turn, allows employees to focus better on client services.

Imagine a blog that allows practice group leaders to broadcast information on the new client work they are doing despite the economic slowdown, thereby signaling the economic viability of the firm? Or a wiki that enables community members to post links to resources for coping with a collapsing client or a collapsing 401(k) account? A microblog that distributes one of the best antidotes to anxiety: humor. Or RSS set up to provide a client team with the most recent news about the client and its industry so that the team is well-prepared to identify business opportunities and respond to client overtures?

Social media tools behind the firewall can help bolster employee morale and strengthen the fabric of your firm. This in turn helps the employees of your firm deliver better client services. Better client services lead to greater revenues.... You get the picture.

Go ahead and prepare that business case for wiki pages to manage client matters. But while you're at it, include a proposal to build an employee facing site as well. It may well turn out to be the better investment.



See also, Coping with Anxiety: Change What You Can, Accept the Rest

Laughter: Geek & Poke and the perennial favorite for office humor, Dilbert

Web 2.0 Resistance in Law Firms?

Penny Edwards at Headshift characterizes the 2008 AmLaw Tech Survey as a "disappointing read from a social software/organizational change perspective." Alan Cohen, who reported on the survey in Law.com's Legal Technology section, admits that while there's lots of talk within law firms about social media tools, relatively few of those firms have deployed many of these tools given the ubiquity of these tools on the internet. And, those that have attempted to take a walk on the wild web 2.0 side have limited themselves to "ho-hum stuff by internet standards." The survey reports that 43% of the firms have at least one blog and 24% have internal wikis, but I suspect that much of this has happened because these tools were bundled (albeit imperfectly) with the SharePoint platforms these firms have deployed. With a few notable exceptions (see Penny Edwards' post), we haven't heard about many truly transformative deployments of social media tools within law firms.

Why?

According to Alan Cohen, law firm CIOs and IT directors are definitely thinking about web 2.0, but in the following terms: "What emerging technologies are worth investing in -- and which aren't ready for prime time? " Prime time? When folks all over the world are diving into social computing with remarkable enthusiasm, can you really treat these technologies as experimental? Perhaps the real issue is that law firms have not yet identified uses for these technologies that feel like incremental rather than revolutionary changes to current business processes. So, to the extent you can use a blog or wiki to do something that is already done by e-mail, it's a safe option to propose to your firm -- provided you can convince folks to leave their Outlook cocoons. For law firm knowledge management programs, the usual approach is to identify and implement these incremental uses of social media tools and then coax your colleagues a little further out of their comfort zone with more ambitious implementations of these tools. Unfortunately, this "substitution innovation" does not take advantage of what Penny Edwards considers the greatest asset of "new technologies like RSS, micro-blogging, social tagging and networking tools, [which] offer possibilities for radical change in the way in which things are done."

The other significant challenge that results in what appears to be law firm resistance to web 2.0 is that for quite some time now the big IT issue for these firms has been electronic discovery. And, eDiscovery has led to a whole host of new tech problems that law firm IT departments are forced to tackle. Therefore, while web 2.0 tools may be the latest wave to sweep the technosphere, law firm CIOs and IT directors believe that they have more pressing issues to handle, such as ... data storage.

Add the inevitable slowdown in IT spending that is emerging in the current economic environment, and you have yet another reason to decide that web 2.0 is not yet ready for law firm "prime time." To be honest, however, is the real issue that law firm knowledge managers and their IT counterparts are not themselves ready for web 2.0?

[For other helpful analysis of the IT Survey, see Ron Friedmann's Strategic Legal Technology blog, which reports, among other things, that the survey provides "good confirmation for those struggling with these issues daily."]

7 Principles of Law Firm KM

Dave Snowden's 3 Rules of knowledge management have expanded to 7 Principles, now that he is focusing on law firm knowledge management. (Perhaps there is just something about lawyers that invites the creation of more rules). Here are the 7 Principles:

1. Knowledge can only be volunteered, it cannot be conscripted.
2. We only know what we know when we need to know it.
3. In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge.
4. Everything is fragmented.
5. Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success.
6. The way we know things is not the way we report we know things.
7. We always know more than we can say, and we always say more than we can write down.

This is a list worth chewing over. I expect I'll come back to it several times. In the meantime, I'd urge everyone involved in law firm knowledge management to take a hard look at their KM programs and measure them against these 7 principles. A large number of firms are engaged in classic KM 1.0 efforts: trying to convert tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, creating precedent collections and brief banks, writing practice guides to convey best practices, etc. These methods seem to violate one or more of the 7 Principles. It would be worth spending a little time to determine if you are achieving the levels of success you and your firm anticipated from this efforts. If not, how much of that is due to the fact that your projects do not conform to these principles? If you are truly successful in your KM 1.0 approach, we should talk. You may have identified an interesting exception to the 7 principles.

[Hat tip to Dennis Kennedy's microblogging on Twitter.]

Collaboration -- All or Nothing?

In my prior post on Culture and Technology, I talked about the need to match carefully the social media tools you are offering in your law firm knowledge management program with the organizational culture of your firm. Now we need to go a little deeper. Many discussions on this topic treat collaboration in a binary fashion -- either you've got collaboration or you don't. And, if you don't, you get a free pass on deploying social media tools. In reality, your choices are not just wide open collaboration or nothing. As Andrew Gent points out in his post, The Alternatives to Collaboration, there are several ways of working that result in productivity. We need to be sure we take account of all of these and provide the appropriate tools.

Here's how he identifies two different modes of working that are alternatives to open collaboration:

Conspiring is very common among senior contributors within a team. Conspiring is simply a form of collaboration where the"community" is limited, usually to select members who the contributor trusts. Rather than speak out or agree during meetings, this individual will seek out others who they feel will understand and appreciate their contribution and work with those people to flesh out their ideas. They may even strategize privately about how to bring the rest of the team "around" to their way of thinking. (This is the conspiratorial part of the equation.)

[...]

Competing, on the other hand, happens out in the open. Competing is founded on two basic assumptions:

• Ideas reached by consensus are not necessarily the best ideas. Rather, they are ideas that sound most agreeable or that provide the least resistance to current conditions (in other words, ruffle as few feathers as possible).
• By openly pursuing multiple approaches in parallel, you can test more possibilities and (the key to competing) inspire each group to reach farther and develop a more complete and creative solution.

If you have wide open, top to bottom collaboration, then you're closest to the internet model of social networks and should be able deploy the standard tools (e.g., blogs, wikis, forums, distribution lists) with minimal adjustment for the realities of corporate life. If you have a significant number of productive "conspirators" then you need tools that allow wide open collaboration within this very small group of trusted colleagues (e.g., IM, limited access wikis and blogs). For competitors, you need to provide a forum where they can battle their way to victory (e.g., open access wikis, microblogging).

By acknowledging that collaboration may not be possible for all, you give yourself permission to identify other productive ways of working within your law firm. Once you understand how these other methods work, you're better placed to introduce effective social media tools that fit neatly with established modes of working. This requires moving from a monolithic view of organizational culture to a much more nuanced one. Done correctly, this should result in higher adoption rates within the various sub-groups that exist and thrive within your law firm. Do this with enough sub-groups and you'll have reached enterprise 2.0 nirvana.

Culture and Technology

Knowledge management without cultural awareness rarely is successful. You can be on the verge of deploying the best technology tools in the world, but if those tools aren't in synch with your organizational culture, you might as well distribute quill pens and parchment. Carl Frappaolo (VP Market Intelligence a AIIM International) and Dan Keldsen (Director, Market Intelligence at AIIM International) made this point very clearly in a terrific presentation they gave on October 3. (For helpful summaries of their presentation, see Ron Friedmann's blog and Jack Vinson's blog.)

Carl has posted their slides on his blog, Taking AIIM. When you get over to that blog, pay particular attention to slide 16, which shows the stages of cultural evolution, overlaid with the stages of technology. This slide demonstrates that you need an organizational culture that reflects a specific level of collaboration before you can implement particular tools successfully. If you've got folks working in splendid isolation with no desire to change their modus operandi (i.e., "islands of me"), they won't be receptive to your brilliant web 2.0 technological advances. You can coax, you can beg, you can embarrass yourself anyway you choose, but they just won't get it. And they most certainly won't adopt your new tool.

Besides the degree of collaboration prevalent in your organizational culture, you also have to be aware of the limits your culture puts on information. So, you want a wiki? Make sure you've got an organizational culture that permits the free and open exchange of information. If you're in an organization that discloses information on a need to know basis only, don't be surprised if your wikis are under-utilized. Equally, if you're in an organization that is excessively hierarchical, don't expect junior folks to contribute to your new blog or wiki without explicit permission from senior managers. In each case, the organizational culture will severely curtail the open information exchange that blogs and wikis promote.

The trick here is to get better at anthropology and then pitch the tools to meet the culture. If you've got your heart set on yanking your law firm knowledge management program into the 21st century by introducing social media tools, wait until you see specific forms of collaboration or conversation emerging among your lawyers. Let them enjoy that for a while and then watch for stresses or pain points to emerge. If they do, offer a tool that can alleviate the pain. If there's no pain, it's unlikely there will be much user interest in changing how they work. Busy lawyers rarely push for new technology if what they've got basically functions -- even if there is something that would objectively work much better. They sensibly weigh any inconvenience of their current methods against the perceived gross inconvenience of learning something new. As with most things, overcoming inertia is tough. However, it's a much easier battle if you harness the natural forces of your organizational culture.

Moving at the Speed of Molasses

It doesn't really matter how great your law firm knowledge management team is at creating and planning effective KM projects if the bureaucracy of your law firm doesn't let you get things done in a timely fashion. While all of us have experienced project delays from time to time, one of the most frequent complaints I hear about law firm KM is that it seems to move at a rate comparable to molasses in January. (Of course, there are notable and laudable exceptions to every rule.)

Some may say that the complaints are simply the result of the whining nature of knowledge managers, but that sweeping condemnation really is not fair. Nor is it fair to say that we're suffering from the "grass is greener on the other side" syndrome, since there are too many of us who can tell sorry tales of delayed or abandoned projects. It might be instructive to hear from Neil Richards, who has worked in law firms and who discovered it was a completely different experience to work in a bank:

This recent exposure to life outside law firms has provided a stark contrast as to how things get done, which got me thinking. My experience and the experience of friends who work in law firms indicates that projects and plans take a long time to execute. Simply getting a project up and running can take months.

By way of comparison, my current project has only been on the books for a short time. Internal bureaucracy is squashed, decisions are taken and progress is made on a daily basis. The bank has well over 100,000 employees, easily more than the combined sum of the employees of the top 10 UK law firms.

While a sample of one is neither scientific nor dispositive, Neil's experience as recorded in his blog post, Life in the fast lane, is instructive. And, it probably accords with what we've been suspecting for some time.

So what accounts for the difference between KM in a law firm versus KM in other types of businesses? Is it that a partnership inherently operates differently from a company? Do law firms lack the vision and leadership to get KM projects done? Is it that law firms aren't really geared to operate as effective businesses? Are bureaucratic rivalries more prevalent in law firms? Do IT departments in banks understand the value of knowledge management better than IT departments in law firms?

As with most things, you can't always generalize. It's best to ask these questions in the context of your own firm. How does your law firm stack up against the bank Neil is working for? Can you honestly say that at your firm, "[i]nternal bureaucracy is squashed, decisions are taken and progress is made on a daily basis"? If not, why not?

Perhaps once we have answers to these questions, we'll be able to get a little bit closer to what Neil has had the pleasure of enjoying at that bank:

What I do know is that it’s remarkably more satisfying to work in an environment where one’s own brain is the bottleneck as opposed to the inner machinations of one’s firm, and that means it will continue to be challenging for firms to keep the high-performers within their back-office.

So pay attention to this issue. Neil's experience contains both a warning and a goal. If you can't deliver KM projects in a timely fashion, not only will you have trouble hanging on to the best members of your team, but you and your KM effort will lose credibility within your firm. By contrast, when you're finally at the point where your "own brain is the bottleneck," you'll have hit the sweet spot for law firm knowledge management. And then, the sky's the limit!

Thought Experiment #2: The Perfect Law Firm KM Program

In yesterday's post I discussed the value of thought experiments (in the right hands) and outlined a thought experiment that could help you break out of a rut in your law firm knowledge management program. Today, I'd like to propose another horizon-expanding thought experiment.

What if you could start your KM program from scratch and had the ability to create the perfect law firm KM program by cherry-picking the best elements from the KM programs of other law firms?

- Which elements would you choose?
- Why?
- What changes would you make to adapt them to your environment?
- What changes would you make to improve their functionality?
- Which elements of your own KM program would you keep?
- How would you enhance them?

This is not intended as an exercise to feed the green-eyed monster that sits on your shoulder. Nor is it intended to send you into the depths of depression. The point of this exercise is to get you thinking critically about what a great KM program in your law firm could look like, drawing on the successes of your colleagues. This should help you with goal setting and priority setting. There's a wealth of knowledge management experience in your peer firms. This is a way to gather those riches and analyze them objectively, with a view to improving the offerings of your own law firm knowledge management effort.

If you don't get past the wish list phase of this thought experiment, you won't get much value from the exercise. You really need to push your analysis to be sure you understand what makes a law firm knowledge management program great and what would make that great program successful in your law firm. With that knowledge, you can move a substantial distance on the path to running a KM program that your colleagues in other law firms would love to steal.

Records Mis-Management

Do you know where your records are?

Simon Chester, blogging at Slaw, reports on a disturbing trend of missing government records:

Countless federal records are being lost to posterity because federal employees, grappling with a staggering growth in electronic records, do not regularly preserve the documents they create on government computers, send by e-mail and post on the Web.

Unfortunately, this problem is not confined to government. The flood of electronic information is not being captured effectively by all law firms. Lawyers, legal assistants and secretaries can't stay on top of their e-mail and are falling behind in their efforts to put their electronic correspondence in their firm's records management system.

This is a major law firm knowledge management problem. Not only does this correspondence contain valuable know-how, but in some cases it constitutes an important part of a client's record file. Yet gaps persist and the problem grows in magnitude.

Some firms have tried to address this by making it mandatory to file client-related e-mails in their central records system. Others have encouraged lawyers to do the right thing and have even offered relatively easy tools and training sessions to help with the process. However, far too many firms have effectively closed their eyes to the problem, evidently hoping that it will just go away of its own accord.

Document retention policy? Hardly. But, these chickens will come home to roost some day, most likely in the form of an unpleasant law suit. Is your firm prepared for that eventuality or is it in denial about its records mismanagement? Now's the time to ask the tough questions and implement some sensible solutions.

Constructive Destruction

A commentator on the economy described our current travails as "constructive destruction." Clearly this optimist believes that good will come out of our economic troubles. In some ways, this is not dissimilar to the fertilizing benefits of a forest fire. Short term pain for long term gain.

Since law firms are so dependent on market forces, it is a rare firm that can ignore the economic turmoil around it and continue with business as usual. For law firm knowledge management departments, there will undoubtedly be a period of retrenchment as everyone tries to hold the line on budgets until we have more clarity about the direction of the economy. This gives law firm knowledge managers a couple of choices: you can grit your teeth and trim where you think you'll feel the least pain OR you can take the opportunity to engage in a little constructive destruction.

Constructive destruction, in this context, means identifying programs that may be working decently, but not optimally. Consider what would be required to get them to optimal operations. And then consider whether that is an investment worth making, regardless of current economic conditions. If the answer is yes, make the investment. If the answer is no, kill the program. That's the destruction part of constructive destruction.

The harder part of constructive destruction comes with being constructive. Here are a few ideas to get you pointed in the right direction:

1. Before you destroy a program, make sure you've milked it for all the learning it can offer. There's absolutely no need to repeat your mistakes.

2. Once you've destroyed a program, be sure to redeploy the newly-free resources to achieve something better. Don't let them just lie around.

Painful though it may be, constructive destruction is an approach used regularly by Mother Nature and, it appears, by market forces. Try applying it to your KM program and see what benefits accrue.

Twittering Inside the Firewall

Are you tempted by the idea of Twitter inside the firewall? For true Twitter junkies, it may be nearly irresistible. And, now, we're hearing about some new Twitter-clones that are designed to operate within enterprises. However, before you start pushing this as the next big thing for law firm knowledge management, consider the following: What existing workflow or tool will Twitter replace or enhance within your law firm?

In my earlier post, Are You Creating Problems or Solutions, I discussed the negative repercussions of pushing a tool versus identifying a current way of doing things that could be done better with a little technical assistance. In the case of Twitter, it could be an obvious substitute for IM. However, how many law firms have overcome their record retention questions and discovery phobia to the extent that they have actually implemented a robust IM program? If your lawyers are not IMing now, why would they start Twittering?

Alternatively, if you are in one of those rare firms where the lawyers unfailingly inform their assistants exactly where they may be found at all times, a Twitter-like tool could be a nice enhancement. However, if your lawyers tend to wander off at will, why do you think Twitter will change that behavior?

For more issues to consider before you promote a Twitter clone within your law firm, see Lee Bryant's helpful post on the Headshift blog, It's like Twitter, but for .... (For those of you who have read this far, but aren't entirely sure you understand what Twitter or Microblogging is all about or how it might operate within a law firm, take a look at the following post by Björn Negelman (recommended by Lee Bryant): Microblogging as a Corporate Tool.)

Now, before you start jumping up and down, let me be clear. This is not intended as a screed against technology generally or Twitter (or Yammer or ESME or laconi.ca) specifically. It is just a reminder that no technology is a silver bullet. As knowledge management experts will tell you time and time again, you need the right people and processes in place first or else your new tech toy will fall flat on its face.

Consider yourself warned.

Update: See also Jevon MacDonald's post, Will you Twitter inside the enterprise and Jeremiah Owyang's List of Enterprise Microblogging Tools: Twitter for the Intranet.

Law Firm KM Reality Check

It's hard not to feel a little hung over after a weekend binge that included Hurricane Ike, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch and the potential restructuring of AIG. As we return to our offices this morning and our safe debates about taxonomy and technology, web 1.0 vs web 2.0, mandatory participation in knowledge management efforts vs incentives for voluntary KM participation, it's a good time to remember why we do what we do: to ensure that the right information is in the right hands at the right time so that decision makers can make better decisions. After the past weekend's binge, it's hard not to wonder about the quality of decision making that preceded the debacle. It may be years before we learn (if we ever do) whether any of these firms or the government agencies involved (i.e., the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department) had viable knowledge management programs and what impact those programs had.

Law firms aren't immune from the hubris that seems to affect the financial sector and we certainly suffer the effects of the decisions made on Wall Street. In light of that reality, we should take a second look at our law firm knowledge management programs. To the extent we even can "manage knowledge," are we working with the right knowledge? Do the decision makers actually use our resources? If the answers to either of those questions is no, then you need to ask why. In times of turmoil, it's more important than ever to be relevant. If knowledge management isn't in the thick of things and making a difference, then why are we doing what we're doing?

When KM is Supported by the Top Brass

Most knowledge management treatises and guides will tell you that it is hard to carry out an enterprise wide knowledge management program without the full support of senior management. Unfortunately, within a lot of enterprises the members of senior management are sometimes those least likely to understand or use a KM system. Therefore, their support can be theoretical and that gets communicated to the rank and file as a lukewarm endorsement. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to guess how the rank and file react to a mandate from above that doesn't seem to have any teeth.

With respect to law firm knowledge management the problem is widespread. The senior partners or administrative partners will certainly understand on paper the potential benefits of a knowledge management program. They may even remember back to the days when they were junior associates facing a new assignment without models or practice guides. However, they've come a long way since then and have platoons of associates under them who deal with those issues firsthand. And, with that distance comes a loss of urgency to pursue knowledge management.

Another problem that arises in law firm knowledge management occurs when senior lawyers have acted on their natural tendencies to create order out of chaos and have developed personal knowledge management systems that increase their own efficiency. Even when presented with a reasonably-effective firm wide knowledge management system, they are often reluctant to give up their own tried and true approach.

Finally, there's the culture of most law firms: an aggregation of people who are fiercely autonomous and largely introverted; people who wish to practice law, but don't always want the bother of running an efficient business. These folks cherish their independence and only grudgingly submit to community edicts and systems. It's hard to sell KM systems to these lawyers until you've answered adequately their fundamental question: what's in it for me?

I'm still working on effective solutions to all of these problems, but found it instructive to look at a case in which the "top brass" truly supports the KM program. The top brass I have in mind are senior managers in the US Army. In his article, Army Retools Knowledge Culture, Brian Robinson reports that the Army has taken a decisive move away from its 2001 position of focusing its knowledge management efforts on information technology. They have now decided they need to broaden their focus to encompass people and culture, process, and technology -- in that order. Further, they are taking the radical step of moving away from a culture that fiercely protects the security of information to a culture that emphasizes openness and information sharing:

The culture has historically protected information closely and released it on a must-know basis. Now, Army managers need to learn to see broad information sharing as a natural military skill.

“It’s all about increasing collaboration, and that has huge implications for warfighters,” said Bob Neilson, knowledge management adviser to the Army’s chief information officer. “It’s about not only sharing information but having the responsibility to provide knowledge across the enterprise.”

The 2008 knowledge management principles adopt the move to collaboration that is increasingly prevalent in society:

The creation of a collaborative culture is embedded throughout the list of 12 principles and was the major rationale for the expanded approach to knowledge management that Army Secretary Pete Geren and Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey offered in a memo they sent in July introducing the principles.

They firmly embrace an Army enterprise perspective, they wrote, and “will create an Army where good ideas are valued regardless of the source, the existing knowledge base is accessible without technological or structural barriers, and knowledge sharing is recognized and rewarded.”

All in all, this Army initiative contains a great deal that civilians could learn from and follow. Pay particular attention to the 12 principles articulated in their policy. They would be as apt in a law firm or any other enterprise. The only catch is that in the Army, senior management really appears to understand and endorse effective knowledge management. And, when the top brass speaks in the Army everyone listens. Those are benefits not all of us can claim.