The “White Whale” of Legal Tech Adoption
When Jeff Rovner started working in Knowledge Management, it wasn’t yet Knowledge Management; it was still “this thing that had no name.”
As a practicing attorney for 14 years, Jeff found he was driven to organize his work processes through technology that could make him more efficient. Eventually, the chairman of his firm at the time took note and asked Jeff to chair the firm’s technology committee. As Jeff says, “He saw that lawyers in any practice would benefit if someone could reflect upon what they’re doing, and then make it smoother to do on a repeat basis.” Not long after that, he got an offer from a friend at another firm to focus full time on “this thing that had no name” (but would soon be known as Knowledge Management).
“I would say that adoption is the white whale that I have been chasing and trying to defeat in 21 years of #KnowledgeManagement work. We’ve got to get better at how we connect information to the people who would benefit from it.” Click to Tweet
Law firms began focusing on Knowledge Management for many of the same reasons Jeff did: they wanted to be able to do their work more efficiently. In the last decade in particular, firms have relied more heavily on KM in order to respond to pressures from client demands to deliver work less expensively since, as Jeff says, “Knowledge management is one of the most effective ways to reduce the internal cost of production for legal work.”
Fast forward 21 years, and Knowledge Management is at the forefront of some of the most fundamental issues in legal innovation. But an area where KM still struggles is in driving adoption. “I would say that adoption is the white whale that I have been chasing and trying to defeat in 21 years of knowledge management work,” Jeff says. “We’ve got to get better at how we connect information to the people who would benefit from it.”
One challenge in overcoming the adoption hurdle that as the influence of KM and legal technology have grown, it’s become harder and harder for attorneys to keep up. As Jeff says, “We’ve accumulated so many of these tools that you can’t expect a busy lawyer to know that all of them exist, let alone to know how to use them well enough to use them in the moment when they’re needed.” Another challenge lies in ensuring that attorneys are provided the right information in the right moment. “If your assumptions are wrong and you deliver irrelevant information or incorrect information, it’s worse than having done nothing at all.”
Jeff sees a potential solution in automation. A knowledge management tool could catalogue all of a firm’s knowledge management tools and resources, and create systems to guide busy lawyers to the right tool in the moment they need it. Asked to look ten years into the future, Jeff foresees the technology itself playing a larger and larger role: “I think if you go all the way out to the end of your 10 years, you may find that it is machines that are using these technologies, not lawyers.”
“We’re in an in between moment in which we’re trying to make the lawyers and the machines or software capable partners, to operate closely together to do what neither could do individually,” Jeff says. And looking to the future of Knowledge Management and legal technology adoption, Jeff believes, “it’s reasonable to expect that as time goes on, more and more of the things that we think are uniquely human capabilities will be automated.”
For more of Jeff and Anand’s conversation about the evolution of KM, what law firms can learn from the consulting world, and how adoption of legal tech will impact attorneys’ workflows, law firm business models, and more, tune in to The Modern Lawyer podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud, or modernlawyerpodcast.com.
