For today’s law firms, knowledge is everything. Law firms are built upon the knowledge and expertise of its people, so it’s no surprise that knowledge management (KM) has evolved to become a strategic partner in the modern firm. Over the years, forward-thinking firms have embraced KM technologies to facilitate innovation, encourage knowledge-sharing - and more importantly, prevent the loss of the firm’s most valuable asset. 

The legal landscape has changed significantly over the past few years, and the arrival of COVID-19 has introduced even more challenges and uncertainty.  According to a recent PWC survey, the average number of chargeable hours fell by 2-11% and more than 80% of law firms are concerned that the pandemic will stop them from meeting their financial ambitions. In just the past few months, we’ve seen several law firms in the UK respond to economic pressures with redundancy rounds and staff cuts. 

As the legal workforce continues to evolve, today’s firms must ensure that they are effectively capturing, maintaining and sharing the expertise of its people. Whether it’s through redundancies, retirement or change of vocation, every time a lawyer leaves your firm, they’re taking their tacit knowledge with them. The right technology is crucial in closing this knowledge gap created by the departure of lawyers and partners. 

While many firms struggle to capture and sift through imposing amounts of data, those that are able to easily capture, effectively maintain and quickly surface relevant expertise from across the firm are emerging as the strongest competitors. Here, we look at how your law firm can prevent the loss of valuable knowledge through effective KM management and technology.

Change the Culture of the Firm

Law firms traditionally tend to be individualistic. Lawyers often believe that their knowledge is their most valuable asset and shouldn’t be shared with others. However, that type of mindset can be detrimental to the long-term success of your firm.

To prevent knowledge loss, it’s imperative to create an organisational culture that encourages collaboration and communication. While it’s no small feat to shift the culture of your firm, it’s an incredibly important step in ensuring that knowledge is viewed as a collective asset rather than an individual one. 

One way to begin the shift is to be transparent and include lawyers early on in your strategy planning process. For example, Castren & Snellman, a full-service law firm based in Finland, has found continued success with its KM programme by embedding it into the everyday culture of the firm. The firm’s Legal Tech trainees are tasked with not only maintaining and managing the KM system, but also providing training sessions, collaborating with lawyers and promoting the programme across the firm. 

Create the Right Framework for KM

The modern law firm holds an immense amount of information and expertise. All too often, this knowledge is stored in separate systems or not at all. Creating a strategic framework for managing knowledge across the firm can help ensure that knowledge is accessible, actionable and stays within the firm, even when lawyers leave. 

The right technology can help. For example, Sysero enables you to bring together knowledge libraries and workflow automation to create a robust framework for capturing, maintaining and sharing valuable expertise across the firm before critical partners and lawyers depart. Furthermore, internal and external knowledge can be integrated into a custom know-how repository that the firm’s lawyers can easily search and manage. Combined with contextual search tools to help optimise the search experience, content most valuable to lawyers immediately surfaces. 

Maintain Quality Knowledge & Know-How

The knowledge held within a law firm is continually evolving. That’s why it’s critical to monitor and manage the quality of your firm’s knowledge library. As new know-how is added and lawyers leave the firm, using automation can help keep your firm’s knowledge relevant, high-quality and accurate. 

Automated workflows can be used to automatically request content reviews from subject matter experts or notify KM managers of expiring or outdated knowledge. Additionally, KM technologies like Sysero allow you to integrate your knowledge base with Active Directory, simplifying list management for knowledge managers. As someone leaves the firm and is removed from Active Directory, they are removed as an author within the knowledge repository. Their authored documents remain and can be re-assigned to a new author. 

Preventing Knowledge Loss in the Law Firm

Advances in KM technology are paving the way for vast improvements in preventing knowledge leakage in today’s firms. As the legal workforce continues to evolve, the successful implementation of KM technology will be imperative to law firm success. Is your firm ready? 

To learn more about how Sysero’s technology can help your firm conquer the challenge of knowledge loss, please get in touch with us at info@sysero.com.

Posted 10th March 2020

For today’s law firms and legal providers, knowledge is everything. Think about it - almost every client interaction from your firm relies on some form of knowledge, whether it be legal knowledge, client knowledge or organisational insights. The success of your firm is intrinsically tied to the specialist knowledge it holds within its walls. However, all too often, these invaluable insights and tacit knowledge assets leave the firm with the lawyers that possess them.

As an entire generation of senior lawyers and partners rapidly approach the age of retirement, firms are ushering in a younger generation empowered by high levels of mobility and a desire for innovation and transformation. According to the most recent PWC Annual Law Firms’ Survey, today’s firms face high staff turnover rates driven by short-term contracts, employer competition and concern over opportunity for advancement. At the same time, an Altman Weil survey found that partners age 60 or older were responsible for at least a quarter of law firm revenue at 63 percent of firms. 

The legal workforce is changing faster than ever before, and today’s firms must find new ways to effectively capture, maintain and distribute the expertise of their lawyers. While many firms struggle to sift through imposing amounts of data, those that can quickly access, search and manage proprietary knowledge from across the firm will prove stronger competitors and client partners. Here, we look at best practices for ensuring your firm retains its knowledge to drive continued growth for the future. 

Define KM from a Forward-Thinking Perspective

A decade ago, Knowledge Management (KM) was focussed on work product retrieval and reuse. Today, it may be the key to creating a competitive advantage. In the context of the digital age, KM goes beyond just organising, sharing and effectively using organisational knowledge. It’s about surfacing the right information, to the right people, at the right time. In forward-thinking KM, the need is to be able to capture and organise explicit and tacit knowledge from across the firm and empower lawyers to deliver better, more consistent service and quickly solve complex business challenges. 

Choose the Right Technology 

Technology is crucial to closing the knowledge gap created by lawyers’ departures. Fortunately, robust knowledge management systems coupled with workflow automation can provide a strong framework for capturing, managing and sharing expertise across the entire firm before critical partners retire or valuable staff depart. Further, solutions like Sysero, can integrate internal and external knowledge into a custom know-how repository that your firm’s lawyers can easily search and manage. You can also make use of contextual search tools, which help optimise the search experience and quickly surface the content most valuable to the individual users. 

Shift Firm Culture

Law firms traditionally are individualistic, as lawyers are often sold on the idea that their knowledge is their most important asset and it shouldn’t be shared. However, to effectively prevent knowledge leakage, it’s critical to cultivate an organisational culture built on collaboration and communication. While it’s no small feat to shift the collective mindset, it’s a crucial step toward encouraging partners, lawyers and staff to openly share insights and experience and ensure future success for your firm. 

One proven way to begin the shift is to include lawyers in your KM initiatives. For example, when Castren & Snellman collaborated with Sysero to develop a comprehensive knowledge management system called Transformer, the KM team was mindful to include lawyers early in the planning process. As such, the team piloted the programme with the firm’s Mergers & Acquisition team, which lead to early quick wins and programme advocates within the firm. 

Provide the Right Training

To effectively capture and share knowledge, today’s firms not only need to demonstrate the benefits of knowledge sharing, but also educate and train lawyers on how to effectively share their knowledge. When implementing new technology or processes, consider hosting several training events for your lawyers or launching a series of on-demand training tools, which could include instructional guides and videos. As lawyers learn more about your initiative, they’ll discover new tools and features that can help them be more productive, efficient, and deliver higher quality service. 

To learn more about using technology to effectively harness and protect your firm’s knowledge and expertise, get in touch with our team.

Posted by Callie Sierra

3 June 2019

Law firms and lawyers have reached a tipping point for technology as the need for efficiency has grown. Competition is heating up and firms face tremendous pressure to maintain or reduce the cost of services, whilst maintaining quality. For today’s knowledge managers, this age of innovation presents many challenges - yet also ample opportunities.

No longer is knowledge management (KM) limited to organising and managing the firm’s knowledge; it’s expanding to play a larger role in the overall business strategy of legal organisations. Today’s KM departments serve as the firm’s trusted resource for knowledge, collaboration and innovation, and as such, assume responsibility for ensuring that firms don’t miss out on promising innovations and maintain a competitive edge.

Here, we look at forward-thinking ways that KM is bringing legal into the contemporary age and helping to drive greater revenue and efficiency for the modern firm.

Automated Knowledge Management

KM’s responsibility for document assembly tools has grown significantly over the years, and it’s a prime opportunity for KM to greatly impact the firm’s profitability. With more clients favouring fixed-fee arrangements, the potential for KM to positively impact the firm’s bottom line is immense.

McKinsey & Company suggests that 23 percent of lawyers’ time can be automated. If so, KM can leverage automation tools to divert the time lawyers’ spend on repetitive tasks to strategically advising clients and building relationships. For example, finnish firm Castren & Snellman seamlessly combined its knowledge management system with automated document assembly to cut document drafting time by half. The firm’s system, aptly named Transformer, enables lawyers to search for automated documents and quickly complete them by answering a series of questions via an online form. The final work product is then automatically filed under the client matter record in iManage, where lawyers can access it, along with other matter-related files, from anywhere, on any device. Through a more streamlined approach, KM helped shift lawyers’ focus from drafting to producing value.

Designing Tools for Lawyers

Though there is inherent value in KM projects, their success is ultimately determined by lawyer adoption. Lawyers must understand the value and efficiency gains provided by KM tools, and more importantly, be comfortable using them. One area where this is most prevalent is document assembly.

A recent ILTA survey suggests that more than 70 percent of KM teams are either fully or partially responsible for such tools in organisations that use them. Within those organisations, the key to true efficiency gains is providing lawyers with intuitive and easy-to-use tools. Take for example, Swedish firm Vinge, who integrated its document automation system with Microsoft Office to enable lawyers to quickly automate and update complex legal documents directly from within Microsoft Word. By making productivity tools available to lawyers from within their day-to-day work environments, KM made it easier for lawyers to access, use and quickly see the benefits of knowledge-based tools.

Client-Facing Knowledge Management

Client-facing KM initiatives are gaining popularity, as clients seek greater transparency and collaboration with their legal service providers. Many KM departments are teaming up with clients on designing and delivering innovative service delivery tools, such as client automation portals. These self-service portals are designed to provide clients with on-demand access to frequently requested documents, which are managed and maintained by their legal services provider. Client automation portals streamline the document creation process, making it possible for firms to engage in more sustainable fixed-fee arrangements, whilst also enhancing service delivery.

In today’s highly competitive market, KM plays a key role in helping lawyers work more efficiently and generate more revenue. Through a more strategic and collaborative approach, KM can pave the way for firm-wide innovation and profitable client service delivery.

29 April 2019
Phil Ayton

For law firms, intellectual property is everything. Every facet of a firm’s interaction with a client relies on some form of specialist knowledge - whether it’s legal, relationship, process or organisational knowledge. By nature of the business, law firms are defined by their authoritative knowledge and expertise. Therefore, you want to be able to effectively develop, manage and leverage your firm’s IP in a way that drives additional value and supports sustainable growth. This starts by designing, building and managing a better knowledge library.

Chances are, your firm’s knowledge library is the first stop for lawyers looking for know-how, document templates and other matter-related knowledge. However, oftentimes, that crucial information is difficult to find, out-of-date or just plain inaccurate. As the gateway to the organisation’s IP, your firm’s knowledge library should be a place where lawyers can quickly find relevant information to start drafting contracts and other documents.

To build a strong knowledge library and effectively manage your firm’s IP, it’s crucial to consider three key aspects: discoverability, adaptability, and quality.

Discoverability

First and foremost, the firm’s IP must be discoverable. Lawyers don’t want to waste time searching and browsing; they just want to find information quickly. To simplify information discovery, you’ll need to carefully plan how you’ll structure and organise your library’s content. The type of content you have, as well as the structure of your firm, should give you a good idea of how to most effectively organise your content.

When it comes to making know-how easily accessible, consider these best practices:

• Create categories: Consider using practice-based taxonomies to enable lawyers to quickly browse, search and filter by practice categories
• Enable easy searching: Allow lawyers to search for information using full-text and metadata searching using keywords, phrases and Boolean search
• Define firm-based metadata: Assign metadata that matches your firm, such as knowledge type, review data, practices, and other firm-relevant information
• Provide context: Offer lawyers additional context around a document by including preview capabilities, as well as ratings and comments

Adaptability

Lawyers mostly use knowledge libraries to access and create various transactional legal documents. These documents then go through a negotiation phase, where both parties will create various versions before the final document is archived into the DMS. However, one area where most IP management processes break down is feeding back changes into the knowledge library.

As new situations arise, new options are added as part of the transactional document. This could be a new variant, legal change or opportunity. Oftentimes, these changes are fed back into the knowledge library as a new variant. This can then create an overabundance of master templates, making it difficult for lawyers to know which one to use.

A more efficient way to manage the firm’s IP is to adapt to the ongoing changes and rationalise which changes to accept or reject. Some best practices include:

• Reduce the number of master templates: Aim to have one master template per transaction to drive consistency and quality
• Provide online guidance: Offer optional text, clauses and classifications to effectively guide lawyers on which content needs to be added to their document

Quality

Last, but not least, is ensuring the quality of your IP. Maintaining the quality of your firm’s IP requires continual monitoring and consistent reviewing. Fortunately, automated quality workflows make it easy to monitor content by enabling quality control gatekeepers to review, reject and accept know-how submissions and changes.

When it comes to ensuring the quality of your IP, follow these best practices:

• Implement quality workflows: Create an automated quality workflow to automatically route changes to responsible parties for review
• Create quality notifications: Flag clauses and templates for review at specific intervals

If you’re interested in learning more about better managing your internal know-how, be sure to check out our on-demand webinar, co-hosted with Lexology, titled From Library to Contract: Automating the Contract Lifecycle.

Posted by Phil Ayton
4 April 2018

Until recently lawyers could use their document management systems for research and to find example documents to use on new matters.  Under post-GDPR security regimes, many firms are locking down their DMS to reduce the risk of personal data being exposed, and these searches no longer yield the same results.  As DMS systems are being locked down, so the need for separate knowledge databases is increasing. 

There are two approaches to building a knowledge database.  The first is to take examples of well managed matters and migrate these documents into a separate location.  These “matter bibles” are often converted to pdfs containing all the documentation produced on a case.  In a post-GDPR world these bibles need to be redacted to remove any reference to the organisations and individuals involved.  The end result of this work is a useful database of lessons learned, but requires lawyers are conversant with all the aspects of the original case and only extract relevant information.  Also, the effort to redact the information requires specialists who could be working on more useful projects.

The second approach requires more effort than the “redacted bible” option but adds more value to the knowledge database by reducing risk, increasing quality and reducing drafting costs on new matters.  Instead of simply sanitising documents as they are moved into the knowledge database, firms can enhance them by adding drafting information and including optional clauses.  Instead of having multiple examples of the same legal document, firms create a single document with information for multiple uses.  As well as making the knowledge database smaller and easier to navigate, sanitising while enhancing the content during the migration process ensures that new matter documents are drafted at a consistently higher standard.

The “managed model” approach requires that new documents being added to the knowledge database go through a quality assessment process before being accepted.  Larger firms can have 50 or more variations of popular legal documents, such as Share Purchase Agreements and these can be used by lawyers from different disciplines such as Private M&A and Real Estate.  To make the most use of the Models, each lawyer needs guidance on the options available and how they apply to their use case.  To manage the document on-boarding process and ensure the knowledge database has high quality model documents and clauses, firms need to develop knowledge workflows.

When a lawyer submits a new model or clause to the knowledge database, they should go through a gatekeeper.  The gatekeeper may be responsible for the entire database, or gatekeepers can be assigned against specific content.  The knowledge workflow needs to identify the correct gatekeeper based on information supplied by the author.  This could be as simple as the author selecting the target practice or could include more rules such as identifying the type of document.  If a gatekeeper receives similar submissions, they include these in a single managed model by adding new content as optional clauses and providing additional drafting information.

Knowledge databases can be enhanced further by providing expiration dates to models and clauses.  When these dates are reached, authors and gatekeepers can review the content to ensure its continued suitability and relevance.  Failure to review content can lead to it’s removal from the knowledge database ensuring that the quality of the content remains high.

Where a model contains a large number of optional clauses, or a model is heavily used, then document automation can be employed to reduce drafting costs and the possibility of errors.  Matters that create many documents based on the same data can be streamlined by grouping automated documents into matter specific document packs. 

Knowledge management is becoming increasingly relevant and having a sanitised, managed repository of know-how can have a significant impact on a firms’ operations and ultimately its success in an industry that relies on reputation.