I was fortunate enough to start my legal career straight out of University at a large city law firm. I can’t say enough about the exposure to interesting work and fantastic training that I received during my time at that firm. What I learned there gave me the tools and habits that would help me to venture out on my own later in life.

Yet during my time at the firm I was taken aback by the lack of initiative between lawyers to share their knowledge with each other. From my perspective as a junior lawyer, it made no sense to be reinventing the wheel to research an issue or draft a document when a colleague down the hall had already done the same work for another client. But there was no system in place to put me on notice that I was unnecessarily replicating work that had already been done.

Certainly, not every matter is alike, and the skills that we lawyers pride ourselves on is not in rote repetition of the law, but in applying the law to the unique facts before us. There was value in doing the hard work of resolving the issue myself to increase my own learning, if nothing else.

But is it appropriate for the client to pay for a junior lawyer to learn on the job when they could have easily drawn on a colleague’s understanding of the issue, or been given a head start on drafting a document by using a suitable template already available? Is that efficient? Should client’s pay for that?

Wikimania

At the time, Wikipedia was the big thing. Bigger than Twitter and Facebook and all that. The librarians at our firm were excited to mirror the success of Wikipedia by starting up an internal law firm Wiki in the hope that it could become the solution for sharing knowledge across the various practice areas in the firm.

I did my level best to try and support the Wiki endeavour in our practice area but found that there was generally little interest from most of the members of my team. Trying to get knowledge out of them, in the form of precedent documents or other interesting pieces of advice or research, was like pulling teeth.

The result was that the Wiki we ended up for our practice area with was sub-par and, as I understand it, after I left it fell into disrepair for lack of interest.

Ahead of our time?

But perhaps we were just ahead of our time. Back then there was no pressing need to ensure the firm did not reinvent the wheel for every client — we billed by the hour, so efficiency was not the top priority. I suspect this is generally true of most firms even today.

That may change in the not too distant future, if prophets of future-law, like Richard Susskind, UK Professor of Law and author of Tomorrow’s Lawyers, are correct. He and others are adamant that the trajectory of the legal profession is geared towards increasing efficiencies, as clients eschew hourly billing and technological improvements, including automated document assembly, become common place.

Under those new pressures, efficient legal knowledge management could become crucial because how a firm leverages the collective wisdom of its members will be one factor affecting profitability in an era of fixed price billing.

In our view, automated document assembly will work hand in hand with effective legal knowledge management practices, enabling firms to leverage the intellectual property that already exists and provide packaged legal products. That is why we are building Quillo — to help lawyers put their templates to work, so that they avoid reinventing the wheel.

Where to start

Getting to grips with how to manage the firm’s knowledge effectively is the first step. For firms that want to get ahead of the game, a recent article that appeared in Slaw had some helpful pointers on getting legal knowledge management processes underway. I have summarised some of these key tips below:

• First, undertake a “knowledge audit” to get the whole firm to pull together their templates and key documents.
• Review the key templates and documents for improvements and select only the most reliable and current ones.
• Remove client names and identifying information from the documents you are going to add to your system.
• Develop a standardised naming convention for documents and save them as read-only.
• Implement a flexible system to capture this knowledge in consultation with the lawyers who are going to be using it. In other words, don’t make it too complex that they won’t want to use it.
• Organise documents into easily understood categories.
• Develop a workflow that will help to identify new documents that should be fed into the system.

For more, see the full article.

Obviously this allows for a huge degree of flexibility. Some firms may find that a Wiki does the trick. If you have any examples of effective processes or applications that have been used by firms to capture their firm’s knowledge, feel free to leave some comments. Maybe this way we can all avoid reinventing the wheel.