The First Step to Sanity
“In the Information Age, the first step to sanity is filtering. Filter the information: extract for knowledge.”
Intuitively, lawyers understand that successful knowledge management is crucial for the modern law firm. However, implementing effective knowledge management is tricky because lawyers find the required tasks burdensome.
Artificial intelligence (A.I.) can change that.
With an effective knowledge management system, law firms can take full control of their knowledge and harness previously hidden areas of expertise. Ultimately, this means that lawyers can better deliver effective and personal service to their clients.
The Change: Time as a cost, not as a revenue
Law firms are brimming with intellectual capital — volumes of court filings, transactional documents, legal research. But abundance without management is merely clutter.
With the billable hour model, time is a revenue driver for law firms. There is little incentive for lawyers to spend time organizing work product from concluded cases, even if it means spending hours subsequently trawling through poorly cataloged content and redrafting documents which their colleagues may have done before.
However, client expectations are rapidly changing. Clients are rejecting the billable hour model in favor of alternative fee arrangements. Anecdotally, we have also heard that lawyers are pressured to write-off time cost associated with research (“Aren’t you supposed to be an expert? Why are you billing me to ‘do research’?”).
Thus, now more than ever, law firms face great pressure to be efficient. Firms that struggle to optimize the conversion of existing knowledge products into valuable output may find themselves struggle to edge competitors in this knowledge economy.
The Challenge: struggling with information silos
The challenge lies in integrating knowledge across various information silos, which is inherent in the legal profession due to client confidentiality. Information silos bear costs to law firms in various ways:
- Duplicated work. Colleagues who are not aware that a piece of precedent exists will waste time reinventing the wheel.
- Domain expertise not harnessed. As work documents are typically organized by client matters, lawyers who are not privy to a matter will not be able to discover the relevant legal knowledge in that matter (e.g. how a partner applies certain legal principles in his/her submission). Domain expertise is not shared for the collective benefit of the firm.
- Unbillable file administration. Lawyers often recall previous documents by their legal topics, document type etc (“Remember the piece of submission done for Mr. Smith on splitting of matrimonial assets?”). These documents are, however, organized by their matter ID/name. If you cannot recall the matter ID/name, you will not be able to retrieve the piece of document you know is there somewhere in your depository.
- Brain Drain. In an industry where the attrition rate at junior and mid-level is high, law firms face high costs of knowledge loss with departing lawyers and getting replacement lawyers up to speed.
The Cure: an intelligent repository
The first step is to integrate information silos into a single knowledge repository. This helps to establish an institutional memory which far surpasses the recall ability of any individual lawyer.
This repository should then catalog the documents in ways relevant to its users. Much like a library would arrange its books according to subject topic, instead of just by titles, this repository should also arrange documents according to their legal topics, legal issues, document types etc. This clustering helps lawyers better retrieve, and discover, relevant and related materials.
Admittedly, lawyers do not have the time to migrate their knowledge work to and subsequently actively manage this repository. This is where A.I. can help to automate the tedious and repetitive tasks involved in knowledge management.
A.I. can also enable this repository to be ‘intelligent’ in understanding its users. Be it content search, multi-dimension filtering, or even allowing users to ask questions in natural language, this intelligent repository needs to be responsive to lawyers’ retrieval patterns.
Adopting A.I. technology in this way turns the challenge of information overflow into an opportunity to take full control of the firm’s intellectual capital and improve the quality of its lawyers’ services.
The INTELLLEX knowledge repository
INTELLLEX aims to help law firms construct a modern law knowledge repository, where knowledge works for your lawyers. To achieve this, we developed SOURCE and STACKS: two powerful tools on one user-friendly interface.
SOURCE and STACKS integrate and streamline the work processes of legal research and knowledge management. Legal research is often the genesis of knowledge generation, and if this knowledge is not managed in situ, lawyers often end up starting from scratch over and over again. With an integrated workflow, lawyers can reduce research inefficiencies and increase the quality of their work product, delivering greater value to their clients.
Do the mentioned challenges sound familiar to you or your firm? Get in touch with us at contact@intelllex.com.
