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 However, oftentimes, that crucial information is difficult to find, out-of-date or just plain inaccurate.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 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.