I've written previously about Legal OnRamp, but some new developments call for an update.
What's new? Primarily, the ability of individual law firms to feature their own selected areas of expertise. First up is Latham & Watkins, with its outsourcing practice. But a bit of background.
LOR was founded in early 2007 with backing from Cisco Systems and describes itself as a "Web 2.0 'Community of Action'" of in house lawyers and law firms, deploying
"the latest Web 2.0 technologies- blogs, wikis, profiles, search, "connections," "Twitter-like" capabilities - in ways that are specifically focused for lawyers to improve productivity and collaboration for legal departments and law firms."
Some additional facts, all verbatim courtesy of LOR:
Legal OnRamp's rapid, viral growth makes it the market leader in social networking for lawyers. It currently boasts nearly 10,000 members (half of whom are inhouse) in 40 countries.
In July 2009, Legal OnRamp announced a strategic partnership with The Corporate Executive Board's General Counsel Roundtable, the world's largest network of inhouse counsel, with 14,000 individual members from more than 500 companies - this partnership will see the General Counsel Roundtable's 14,000 member group added to Legal OnRamp's nearly 10,000 members, making it one of the most powerful inhouse counsel communities in the world.
The ongoing development of the "Legalkipedia," with hundreds of law firms' members authoring tens of thousands of frequently asked questions and answers around day-to-day legal matters.
As part of the roll-out to the General Counsel Roundtable, Legal OnRamp is adding a series of "FirmRamps" - sub-communities within Legal OnRamp which combine deep resources from law firms or other partners with best practice sharing from clients and ongoing discussion and collaboration. Latham & Watkins was the first firm Legal OnRamp invited to create a FirmRamp, focused on Latham's highly innovative work in streamlining the negotiation and operation of complex outsourcing agreements. Latham & Watkins will be offering in-house counsel the ability to pick our lawyers' brains through forums, access to a number of materials and the next generation of our interactive tool, Capture, for speeding up outsourcing transactions.
The fourth of the above is the one I want to focus on today.
But first, a bit more about exactly what LOR looks like and what it offers.
It requires invitation-only membership (although invitations aren't very hard at all to come by), so the home page is immediately personalized to you. Here's mine of earlier today:
I've highlighted a few things with the red arrows:
"Hot Topics"--which appears to be auto-generated depending on activity on various parts of the site--is featured top right;
They offer a group of blogs; recent posts are featured;
It displays "My Profile" and you can of course edit away from there; and
LOR is "presence" enabled, so it lists Members Online pretty much in real-time; you can IM or EM them, etc. (and you can, thank the gods, suppress others' awareness of your whereabouts).
In other words, and as promised, it offers a lot of what we've come to group under the umbrella term "Web 2.0." And, like all topics Web 2.0 or social-networking-related, it invites questions, foremost among them whether this is a fad (I hereby nominate Twitter for the Academy Award in that category) or here to stay.
I humbly nominate blogs for the Oscar for Here to Stay, having demonstrated, or so I believe, for nearly a decade now, their ability to provide focused, intelligent, and informed commentary on topics far too circumscribed to engage the Mainstream Media in any sustained or material fashion. Hasty caveat: Yes, of course, you must tune your antenna quite judiciously to avoid the roughly 1:10,000 signal:noise ratio--but as a discerning reader, that's amply within your control.
Now, back to item #4 on LOR's feature list.
The first so-called "FirmRamp," or micro-community, within LOR itself was recently launched by Latham & Watkins to focus on its outsourcing practice. Core to the "Outsourcing Center" is its so-called "Capture" tool, which is designed to capture the client or prospect's key requirements for the putative outsourcing transaction in order to permit Latham to generate an RFP and or a draft of a contract incorporating those requirements. Here's the Outsourcing Center home page:
On the "introduction to Capture" page, Alex Hamilton, Latham's London-based partner in charge of this efforts, explains as follows:
One of the most time-consuming and expensive phases in any outsourcing project is building your requirements. Latham & Watkins has developed a new approach that can capture requirements with efficiency and economy.
Capture is a set of interactive, intelligent, dynamic forms that help you to quickly and comprehensively capture the stakeholders' requirements. As you complete the forms, questions relevant to the particular transaction are revealed, driven by the options you select. The Capture forms act as a checklist for key issues and, once completed, provide a blue print of your deal's specific requirements.
Using the answers to the forms, Latham & Watkins can then quickly produce an RFP input and/or contract, reflecting the requirements.
The Capture forms support and integrate with Latham & Watkins' Diamond contract structure and modules. There is a Capture form for each part of the agreement (e.g. services, service levels, pricing terms, transition and so on) and the forms may be used in IT and business process outsourcing deals
And the benefits of doing work this way are said to include:
speed
accuracy
a focus on the key issues
enforcement of specific standards
tailored requirements (rather than requirements starting from the last deal done for someone else)
confidence
quality
The process can be kicked off with an online RFP submitted directly to Latham, which looks like this:
Minimal information is required, only:
name of your project, and version if applicable
your name
date
contact info including name, telephone, and email
Let's step back. What's really going on here?
Abstracting from all the buzz--which different people will view positively and negatively--about social networking, Web 2.0, etc., these various tools and sub-sites are ways for lawyers to collaborate with clients. This is what lawyers do, and what they've done since the Code of Hammurabi and before.
In that sense, lawyers have been "social networkers" from the beginning. The behavior, the interaction with potential clients, and the hoped-for results are not new, only the coinage of "social networking" seems to be new. Remember when we just called it "networking?"
Another thing lawyers have always done is demonstrate their expertise. (Some simply assert it, but that's a mug's game.) So Latham & Watkins could say, "We know outsourcing." That and $2.25 will get you on the subway.
Being far smarter than that, they've of course done something altogether different. They've said, in effect, "Let us show you what matters inyour outsourcing contract; then judge for yourself." If there's any time-tested way to win over a prospective client, this surely is it.
LOR is, then, from one perspective a remarkably conservative initiative: One that is attempting to enable lawyers and clients to do what they've always done, only with up-to-date tools instead of their various predecessors ranging from papyrus, quill pens, messengers, faxes, and FedEx, to email.
From the opposite perspective, however--and the one you can hear loud and clear when LOR talks about its mission (see the early part of this column)--LOR and its latest invention, "FirmRamp"'s (another is in the work about ethics, courtesy of Goulston & Storrs), are all about turning the profession on its head: "Welcome to the Future" as the home-page proclaims in the lead story. Insofar as no one else is really doing this, certainly not remotely near the scale of LOR after its 2-1/2 years, then the story truly is about something New and Different.
At the intersection of these two perspectives, the timeless and the innovative, lies the challenge that I would worry about the most had I a stake in the success of LOR. (I don't.) And that challenge simply is to maintain and consistently enhance the quality of its content and of its community.
This can pose a chicken and egg dilemma. People won't visit if there's nothing of value to come for, but firms have to publish content of value in order to have any hope of attracting high-quality traffic (and, by hypothesis, before there is much of any such traffic).
In this regard, LOR is trying to beat the 1:10,000 odds (I made up that ratio, of course). To all appearances, they have quite the fighting chance.
Last week I had a chance to catch up with Jeroen Plink, the CEO for the US operations of Practical Law Company. Jeroen has been with PLC for over 6 years and, in a previous life, worked as an attorney for Clifford Chance and Latham & Watkins.
Unfamiliar with Practical Law Company?
In the UK, PLC has been around for nearly 20 years, and they're just about to launch in the US (more about that anon). Perhaps the best way to think of them is as "knowledge management to the profession," or, a bit more precisely in economic terms, "content experts taking advantages of economies of scale to provide knowledge and efficiency to the profession." That's a mouthful, so I'll let them say it in their own words:
"PLC is the UK's pre-eminent provider of legal know-how, transactional analysis and market intelligence for business lawyers."
What do they cover? Practice areas in the UK include:
Arbitration,
Competition, Construction, Corporate, Cross-border, Dispute Resolution, Employment, Environment, Finance, Financial Services, IPIT & Communications, Pensions, Private Client, Property, Restructuring & Insolvency, Share Schemes & Incentives, and Tax.
In the US, they'll be starting with Corporate & Securities (M&A, securities and capital markets, private equity, venture capital, JV's and cross-border transactions) and with Finance (general lending, acquisition and project finance, bankruptcy and restructuring).
And in each area? They provide:
Practice notes, which are explanatory how-to guides covering deal structure, process, and documentation;
Standard documents and clauses: Model agreements and clauses each with drafting notes that provide detailed guidance on negotiating and other issues;
Checklists;
Flowcharts and timetables;
"What's market", a database analyzing and summarizing current deals, securities filings, and market practice for various aspects of transactions;
Legal updates (regular updates on developments in the law and the market, with practical implications);
Cross-border analysis of particular areas of law; and
“In Dispute”: Analysis of deals that are being disputed (currently focusing on deals affected by the financial crisis such as Clear Channel and United Rentals)
And how do they do this? With real live lawyers, formerly at name-brand law firms and in-house legal departments (for their US offering, including Davis Polk, Debevoise, Dewey LeBoeuf, Latham, Paul Weiss, Pfizer, Shearman & Sterling, and Skadden, among others) who develop and maintain the materials (meaning keeping constantly up to date with current law and market practice).
This invites some questions about the business model. First and foremost, there's a "chicken and egg" challenge, in that you can't expect serious law firms or in-house departments to subscribe to PLC services until they have substantial content prepared, and PLC has to commit to substantial investments in costly professional staff before they can claim to have that content. In the US, they've been investing in preparing US-specific content for about a year and a half, and currently have over 20 full-time lawyers drafting material.
But the second aspect of the business model follows on the heels of the first. While their fixed costs are high, their marginal costs (of signing up an additional law firm or in-house department as a subscriber) are virtually zero. This should enable them to scale up quickly once they gain critical mass here. And since 70% of AmLaw 100 firms that have UK offices and over 1, 700 law departments (many of which are in global companies with US parents or subsidiaries) are already subscribers to PLC in the UK, their marketing efforts here should find a relatively friendly reception.
PLC will launch its US services in December.
I asked Jeroen what PLC's competition was. "Well, in the UK, one could say it's law firms' own professional support lawyers and internal staff who build and maintain firm resources, but we actually find they're clients more than they're competitors. We're able to help them get their jobs done more efficiently, and they find us a valuable resource."
What about West or Lexis/Nexis, I ask? "They're very good at informing people about primary and secondary sources, but we think our niche is helping business lawyers actually get the deal done more efficiently.”
What do you view as barriers to entry to competitors?
"Obviously, setting up a service like PLC's requires significant initial and ongoing (to keep the materials up to date) investment. In the UK, we have an advantage in that we have been around for a long time."
How is your market entry into the US going?
"Well, we've certainly been encouraged by US clients in the UK, who say it would be 'fantastic' if we had this in the US. Obviously we are concerned about the current economic climate but then again many of our resources are geared towards cost savings and with all of the new regulations expected to come into force I would say there is a place for a player who can make sense of it all from a practical perspective. When we launched our services in the UK, it was during an economic downturn as well and we think we helped our clients weather it then as we hope to do now.”
Is your entry to the US different than your experience in the UK?
“It's a challenge because there are 50 jurisdictions. Indeed, the main reason for starting in corporate, securities and finance is because most transactions in those areas are governed by New York, Delaware and federal law which makes it a bit more manageable from the outset. We are planning to cover California from early 2009. We are fine-tuning our offering in areas where the law is different for each state and have a short list of other areas to cover from 2009 onwards."
And as for the future?, I ask. What about the EU, the Mideast, Asia?
"The 'grand plan' for PLC," he says, "is definitely to look at other markets as well. But at the moment the US is our key focus."
PLC's business model is deeply intriguing. Think of it as outsourcing KM for the profession to one provider who benefits enormously from economies of scale. This requires deep investment on their part, and, more importantly, impeccable quality and credibility.
Those last two characteristics are attributes which, as we know all too well of late, can be forfeited in a heartbeat. It's a daring model for that, and a potentially chancy one. But based on their track record in the UK, their launch in the US is their next inevitable move. I for one will be watching PLC with great interest.
Have you ever considered a completely different approach to strategic planning for your firm? An approach kind of like Toyota's?
Let me explain.
There are traditional and classic strategic plans, which typically focus on practice group and geographic reach, perhaps with an overlay of a third dimension of client or industry focus. These can be amplified and implemented by organizational and structural adaptations including practice group management, client relationship initiatives, and business intelligence and profitability analysis toolkits.
These are relatively familiar—even if honored most often in the breach—but consider a different approach entirely, namely Toyota's.
Now, understand that Toyota is light-years away from being a stranger to classic strategic planning. They came to the US marketplace with extremely modest offerings (early critics called their first cars "two motorcycles bolted side by side," and worse) but relentlessly and purposefully moved upscale, with the Camry now the best-selling car in the US. (The Toyota Corolla is number 5, the Honda Accord #2, the Nissan Altima #3, and the Honda Civic #4, shutting the US out of the top five altogether, but that is not only a topic for another day, it's not a topic for "Adam Smith, Esq." tomorrow or ever.)
Finally, Toyota has gone upscale in a large way with its introduction of the Lexus line. (And for my earlier thoughts on what that might mean for law firm land, see Lessons from Lexus.)
The real genius of Toyota's rise to becoming top automotive manufacturer in the world lies elsewhere altogether. It's simply the "Toyota Production System," as described summarily in this wonderful New Yorker "Financial Page" piece by James Surowiecki (who's always worth reading, by the way).
The "TPS" began after World War II when Japan was rebuilding and capital, equipment, and labor were all hard to come by. A Toyota engineer named Taiichi Ohno decided to make a virtue of necessity by instituting a system to get the absolute most out of every part, every machine on the assembly line, and every worker. The principles were, and are:
Do away with waste;
Have parts arrive the moment they're needed, not before and not after; and
Fix problems as soon as they arise.
You may be saying to yourself that these principles are not new, and they're not. Ohno borrowed from both Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford, among others, not to mention throwing in a healthy dose of common sense. But the secret of the TPS is that it's no secret at all. According to Surowiecki, more than 3,000 books and articles have analyzed Toyota, they regularly give exhaustive factory tours, and concepts such as the andon system (a simple pull-cord that any worker can yank at any time to signal a problem and shut down the entire assembly line) have been widely adopted.
Let me remind you of another company that did things differently, was wide open about it, and ran away from its peers in the industry (at least for awhile): Dell Computer, with its zero-inventory model, building no computer until a customer had ordered it, collecting the cash payment upfront and delivering the machine later, thus becoming one of the first companies of any substance to have negative working capital--the higher its order level, the more cash it had on hand.
The Dell model worked brilliantly until laptops slowly began to overtake desktops in market share. What's wrong with that? Simply that people like to physically see, handle, pick up, and hold onto laptops before they buy them, whereas they're comfortable buying desktops (physical) sight unseen. Dell has since regrouped, but the point is simply this: Dell's model was totally transparent; everyone knew what it was; Michael Dell himself was happy to explain it ad infinitum in the business press; and yet no one managed to copy or even seriously emulate it.
Which brings us back to Toyota. The TPS is the world's worst-kept secret competitive advantage. Let's revisit some of its components:
Employees contribute suggestions--by some counts, a million suggestions a year. They can be large but mostly they're small: Move this shelf of parts closer to me, change the angle of the lighting, let me pick up the part with my left hand before I install it with my right, etc.
Embrace the notion of kaizen, or continuous improvement; you needn't go for the touchdown pass or the home run. Singles, bases on balls, and 4 yard runs will get you where you need to be.
"Innovation" is not reserved to the executive suite or the elect; everyone is involved, every day.
Not every suggestion works. Fine. Even Toyota has had its miscues, including a batch of quality problems in 2006. But cumulatively, the impact is game-changing.
Note what this is the antithesis of: The bolt-from-the-blue approach to change, where everyone invests their hopes in a grand scheme. As Surowiecki puts it, this is more like the regular sustained diet approach to weight loss (competitive advantage) as opposed to the miracle 90-day cure. (According to McKinsey, two-thirds of companies that put quality improvement programs in place abandoned them.) And that's precisely why the relentlessness of the Toyota approach is so hard to emulate.
Now, what has this to do with law firms?
Let's pretend you have a basically sound, classic Strategy in place: You know what geographic markets, practice areas, and clients/industries you want to focus on, and you are aware of your strengths, opportunities, weaknesses, and threats. You believe your capabilities are well aligned with your opportunities.
Congratulations; that's a start.
Now consider what adopting the TPS in your firm would need. Here are just some thoughts:
Can associates suggest changes to the KM system or procedures for finding precedent, template, and sample documents and clauses?
How are assignments made? Who has input? What are the criteria?
Are "vacuums" in training part of the assignment process? How are they monitored and addressed?
Has anyone thought about how time worked is lost between the actual work and the final bill? Where are the leakages?
Do associates have the opportunity to be exposed to other practice areas than the one they first choose, even tangentially?
When partners are assembling teams for deals and cases, who has input?
The point is not, really, to suggest anything specific for your firm. The point is to suggest that you might embark on the continuing pursuit of excellence in all you day. Even matters so small as moving a parts shelf closer. For surely, part of the genius of the TPS is not just its concrete suggestions, multitudinous as they are: It's the sense of engagement it engenders. By some measures, Toyota workers generate one hundred times as many suggestions per capita as workers at their competitors.
That, without doubt, is the single most significant component of the genius of the TPS. Why wouldn't you want to embrace that? And remember: It's extremely difficult to emulate, as wide open as it is for all to see. You don't need to fear others seizing upon it as a competitive advantage after they see your example. Or if they try, just remind them that they need to get more exercise, lose weight, and stop smoking.
Here at "Adam Smith, Esq." I've written about Knowledge Management a fair
amount, since it's my belief that knowledge is what law firms sell.
But despite the (I believe) inarguable centrality of KM to what we do, there
are three enormous problems with it:
Too many lawyers don't understand why it's of value to them, or, more precisely,
why the return they could get out of it would exceed the investment they'd
have to put into it. (Never mind the threat of "giving away" your core
professional asset—what you know.)
Too many technologists and IT types don't understand how lawyers work,
and end up creating shockingly powerful but essentially useless applications.
And even the most powerful and user-friendly system requires constant care
and feeding because legal learning is in a state of constant flux: In
a sense, pure white ignorance beats obsolete and mistaken knowledge.
Because some of these obstacles are a blend of the intellectual and the emotional,
a brief foray, presented in video, yields two of
the best visceral explanations of why Knowledge Management matters.
With
a big fat hat tip to Matthew Parsons and Neil Richards of Knowledge
Thoughts, then, our first (2:21 running
time, sponsor's logo at the very end):
And our second (5:29 run time, academic credit and "CC" license at the end):
As I approach the 800th article I will have published here on "Adam Smith, Esq." (for those of you keeping score at home, this will be #797), I realize some topics are evergreen. It may be because they're just intrinsically fascinating, as Woodward and Bernstein famously characterized the Nixon White House tapes: "The gift that keeps on giving." Or it may be that they're in something of a perpetual disequilibrium, oscillating on faster or slower cycles or being pushed and tugged as circumstances change from one antipode of the spectrum to the other (eat-what-you-kill vs. lockstep?). Or it may simply be that we've yet as a profession to arrive at a settled way of addressing them.
In that last category I nominate marketing of our firms, and knowledge management.
Which is why it's instructive, and a bit of a closet relief, to look back at an article like Some Principles of Knowledge Management, published over ten years ago (fall 1996) in Booz-Allen's "strategy+business." Assuming one can get one's mind past the archaicisms (the "World Wide Web" appears in the third paragraph), many of the ten principles enunciated remain true—for better and worse—today.
Let's take a quick tour back through the time machine.
1. KM is expensive (but so is stupidity).
Did you know that McKinsey's objective is to spend 10% of its revenues on developing and managing intellectual capital? It may sound a truism today to say that knowledge is what we sell, but how many years (decades?) did it take American industry to learn that quality was not an expense—it was a feature? Ignorance and forgetting are costly in the same way that poor quality products and services are costly.
Last month I heard the keynote at ILTA 2007, delivered by Captain Jim Lovell, commander of the poxed Apollo 13 moon mission. Aside from telling the enthralling tale of nearly a week's worth of nonstop improvisation by Houston Mission Control and the crew, using systems for purposes they were never designed for and relying on such high-tech tools as duct tape and an old sock to maintain their air supply, he dropped an aside that has stuck with me. Noting the tremendous majesty of the three-stage Saturn V rocket launching them on their way to the moon, he remarked that, "It was a far far better launch vehicle than the shuttle: More reliable, more powerful, more flexible, and even a smoother ride. But you know what? NASA couldn't build a Saturn V today. We've forgotten how."
2. KM requires both people and technology.
I can't resist, so permit me to start with this quote from the article:
"Computers that think are almost here," a Business Week article recently announced, adding that "the ultimate goal of artificial intelligence--human-like reasoning--is within reach."
And Brazil is, and always will be, the economy of the next decade.
We all know that computers are superb at capturing, copying, and distributing information. Just ask the RIAA. But people are unmatched, and probably will be as far as the eye can see, at synthesizing unstructured knowledge. As our KM tools within firms become more sophisticated, we've realized that one of the key functions has to be what the techies call "expertise locators," meaning the system has to be smart enough to point us towards our partners and colleagues who actually know something about what we're trying to research. The system, in other words, has to have built in to it a function you want to use when the system fails.
3. KM is highly political.
This flows directly from the observation that knowledge is power, to which I would only add that in a law firm, knowledge can be revenue. It doesn't get more political than that (in the wrong sort of environment, I mean, which of course is not remotely the case at your firm.)
The other dimension to the "political" component of KM is the economic one of free-riding. Why should I contribute to a knowledge base when, by hypothesis, the only material I can add is stuff I already know—which does me precisely no good.
4. KM requires knowledge managers.
The Brits, of course, have known this for a long time, in the form of "professional support lawyers," and I'm not sure what has taken us so long to admit they have a point. Interestingly, the author reports that even as of 1996 several companies had committed to establishing the post of Chief Knowledge Officer, and they're name brand companies: Booz-Allen & Hamilton, McKinsey, Andersen Consulting, Ernst & Young, Price Waterhouse, Hewlett Packard, and A.T. Kearney.
5. KM benefits more from maps than models, markets than hierarchies.
This I take as the author's rather indirect way of saying (correctly) that one cannot anticipate in advance the rivers, streams, and byways through which knowledge will flow and it's best not to try to straitjacket it into fixed categories in advance. Models and hierarchies tend to be brittle, whereas maps and markets are open-ended, flexible, and capable of evolution and even radical change. One of my favorite examples of this is the trusty old Dewey Decimal System where the "200's" are devoted to religion.
And of course, it is wildly Christianity-centric. (A Scots Presbyterian, I can say this.) 201 through 289 are all related to Christianity (e.g., #232,"Jesus Christ and his family," and #254 "Parish government & administration"). Not until #290 do we reach "Other and comparative religions," and "Islam & religions originating in it" was deemed to have plenty of running room as it was assigned #297 all to itself.
6. Sharing and using knowledge are often unnatural acts.
This may be my favorite—and the author wasn't even discussing lawyers. (His case study was Hewlett Packard.) I can't really improve on his summary of the problem here, so I'll let his words speak for themselves:
"If my knowledge is a valuable resource, why should I share it? If my job is to create knowledge, why should I put my job at risk by using your knowledge instead of mine? We sometimes act surprised when knowledge is not shared or used, but we would be better off assuming that the natural tendency is to hoard our own knowledge and look suspiciously on knowledge that comes from others. To enter our knowledge into a system and to seek out knowledge from others is not only threatening, but also requires much effort."
7. KM means improving knowledge work processes.
If this sounds a little too Delphic, recall that it's a business school professor talking, but let's try to unpack his meaning for a moment. Essentially, he's saying that knowledge in firms is not created in a vacuum; it's created for a purpose (drafting the brief, setting forth the terms of the acquisition, specifying covenants in a securitization indenture). In corporations, it's things like market research, product design and development, and order configuration.
His point is that KM will be improved if the flow of "knowledge work processes" is improved. Does the first-year associate take a stab at the first draft of the brief, or the third-year? Who does edit #1? Edit #2? When does it go to the client? These actually are business processes, and you're performing them today. You might pause and give a moment's thought to whether they're optimal or whether they're "because we've always done it that way."
8. Access to knowledge is only the beginning.
Libraries are ubiquitous, but they're not crowded. (Have you looked at your firm's library lately? I predict it's almost empty.)
What's needed is what my friend John Alber calls "actionable knowledge;" knowledge you can use this very minute. This isn't an academic exercise, after all; the goal is to get the work product out the door, having it reflect the impeccable quality your firm aspires to.
9. KM never ends.
Despite the risk this principle runs of sounding slightly revolting, I'll just allude back to our Dewey Decimal System example and leave it at that. Knowledge is—assuming you're any good—a moving target, with ever increasing ambition in terms of scope, subtlety, and complexity.
Did you ever think back to something you did 10 or 20 years ago and ask yourself how you could possibly have ever been so young and dumb? That's the point.
10. KM requires a knowledge contract
I take issue with this. It's irrelevant, and, as they say in the military, "OBE" (overtaken by events). What the author was referring to, or fearing, was the issue of whether the organization, the individual, or the client "owns" knowledge, and he fears that a proliferation of policies will be required to specify what is whose. He even offers this somewhat snarky remark: "Perhaps the greatest problem with increased KM is
the increased population of lawyers it will engender. Intellectual property law is already the fastest-growing legal field, and it will only grow faster."
Where does this leave us, back from our tour in the time machine?
Many of the challenges of KM are, indeed, timeless, lying, as they do, at the intersection of human nature, competitive dynamics, and the pressures of client service. Our technological tools have surely improved, by orders of magnitude, and our cultural predisposition to acknowledging the value of KM to our firms and our own individual careers has also surely improved, albeit not by orders of magnitude.
KM remains essential to us because knowledge is what we sell. It remains problematic because computers can't do it alone (come on, admit it, you wish they could, don't you?), and because the qualities that distinguish the competent journeyman from the counselor extraordinaire are ineffable.
Here's hoping they always will be.
Update, 11 September: A reader from the UK, who has spent his career in knowledge management at name-brand firms, writes:
As ever Bruce a good article and some of the issues in KM are timeless.
However I believe that in a few years time in-house legal PSL's may well become a dying breed. Over in the UK - I understand that a lot of the PSL recruiting is being done by the likes of Lexis-Nexis and Butterworths as they are steadily looking to do on line precedents for the law firms.
From my experience they aren't there yet but in 2-4 years they will be. I think PSL's will want to go and work there - maybe for a sense of a proper career structure - but also for work life balance which we hear so much about.I think that David Jabbari at A & O's comments on PSLs and them developing a career structure but also getting more involved in Business Development will be the way for most of the major London law firms to go rather than just as legal researchers.
I still also believe that law firms don't fully understand knowledge management and are looking for an IT solution as much as possible so that they don't have to deal with the people based issues.
They also I think want closure and have something solved and put to bed - they don't want it to be an on going process - so maybe that is why they dislike KM.
Sharing knowledge is an unnatural act - but as I have mentioned before people do share knowledge for a variety of reasons - but primarily in my view they do it based on reciprocal altruism - or as I call it the Godfather approach -i.e.they expect the person who has received the knowledge to return it at some time in the future when asked for it.
They also need to look at the way that they appraise their staff - although they may say that they appraise people on a range of issues - effectively and this is borne out by my own research the culture of the firm usually drives it to have its lawyers appraised on how many billable hours they achieved and that they didn't have too many black marks against their name.
A lot of partners are not very good at being coaches of growth and learning - but perhaps the short term view that a lot of partners have by being rated on their PEP figures in a league table doesn't help to look to developing the future.
I'd also like to add that I think that good knowledge sharing in a firm can also help a firm to innovate. I spoke about this at a conference in April about the barriers that firms put up that stop knowledge sharing are the ones that also are a barrier to innovation.
I thank readers for writing most sincerely; do not think this remotely smacks of a throw-away line. Indeed, reader feedback is one of the most professionally rewarding aspects of life here at "Adam Smith, Esq." So if any of you have had a thought and hesitated or sat on it without writing me, "snap out of it." (Yes, the immortal line delivered by Cher in Moonstruck.)
Update: 13 September.
Another regular reader from the UK writes:
I have been mulling over your article on KM for the past few days, but was brought up short by the comment you added from a reader yesterday.
One of my current projects is to take a long hard look at our PSL group. Not because there is a perception that they are not useful, but because they, like everyone else in the firm, need to deliver better value year on year. The firm's expectations are not constant. The PSL role here will, I think, be different in 18 months time, just as the roles of associates and partners have already altered to fit the needs of more demanding clients in a tighter market. However, I think it is a leap to say, as your commenter does, that the PSL is dying out. Rather, the role is evolving away from providing generic know-how towards activities that add more value to the firm. This is healthy.
Some of his other comments about law firm KM suggest either that my firm is more enlightened than I thought, or that your reader has only been exposed to very traditional (and hide-bound) attitudes in other firms. I have always found it difficult to reconcile the widely-held view that "lawyers don't share" with my experience of people who are dedicated to client service. That dedication is not always reflected just in the work-for-fees relationship. Sometimes it is altruistic. I also regularly see altruism between colleagues -- sharing pieces of critical market or legal knowledge in order to allow someone else to improve their client relationship or work quality. That is one reason why we work in firms, rather than as sole practitioners. (If you haven't already read it, John Roberts's book on The Modern Firm makes this point much better that I could.)
On the IT point, I have noticed that in firms that are dominated by IT lawyers tend to identify KM with IT, rather than being a question of personal engagement. Again, I suspect that attitude is changing, as is the notion that KM should be a closed process. However, if firms do take that view, they are significantly out of step with KM thinking elsewhere. There is a long and dishonourable history of lawyers (in practice and academia) being too inward-looking and ignoring critical developments in other areas, but my impression is that we are getting better at seeing value in what other professions do.
Coming back to your reader, I think the behaviour he describes would find no favour with Adam Smith. Surely firms that turn against better KM behaviour (effective sharing of know-how and practice experience, sensible focusing of staff on value-bearing activities, humane management of elevator assets) will generate more value for themselves and for the wider economy in the medium and long term?
And here we are with another update on 14 September:
Great post Bruce, probably should be required reading for law firms everywhere.
I'd like to add that from my own experience, I think that most law firms have fallen into the same failure patterns as the rest of the corporate world. Closing the knowledge gaps then closes performance gaps and improves processes. Lack of knowledge strategies designed to close knowledge gaps results in lack of any real successes in KM. And that's why for example, with some of the most expensive search appliances in place, law firms still struggle with basic problems like finding the right document.
Dr. Dan Kirsch
COO & Board Member
Knowledge Management Professional Society (KMPro)
Sometimes we take our IT infrastructure for granted—too much so. In the last few weeks I've encountered a succession of stories where client relationships were strongly reinforced by astute deployment of IT assets. Call it the intersection of marketing and IT.
A useful starting point is Legal Week's recap of its annual Strategic Technology Forum, held this year (hard duty no doubt) at Portugal's Penha Longa resort. The "keynote," if you will, was an hour-long video of the UK IT consultant Richard Susskind interviewing three high-profile managing partners: David Morley of Allen & Overy, Neville Eisenberg of Berwin Leighton Paisner, and Tony Angel of Linklaters. What did we learn?
Without IT, globalization would stop dead in its tracks. For example, at Linklaters (and this is becoming increasingly common), any lawyer anywhere in the world can access their own desktop, with all the systems they'd have at the office, securely.
A&O has developed a centralized information repository named, somewhat menacingly, "Omnia," that gives lawyers access to one virtual file wherever they are and whatever they're working on.
IT increasingly participates in new business pitches. According to Eisenberg, senior IT staff have helped BLP win some critical assignments, while Morley makes the same point in the obverse, noting that law firms are increasingly expected by clients and staff to be at the cutting edge of technology. “If you are not at the leading edge, clients will begin to melt away from you.”
For all the copious amounts of ink that have been spilled on the topic, it remains true that there's a generational shift underway as each new crop of lawyers arrives more and more familiar with technology. Eisenberg put it this way: “As you go down the generations, the dialogue between technologists and other professionals gets better.” The payoff is that having a greater proportion of lawyers who understand technology means teamwork between IT, knowledge management and lawyers improves.
Moreover, it's not just a better or deeper facility with current law firm technology—it's pushing the frontiers into technology that's novel (certainly for law firms). For example, I've been talking about the intrinsic fit between what lawyers do (collaborate on written materials) and wikis for a few years now, but at last it's actually being embraced:
"We are seeing a step change here, the full implications of which we will not know for a while,” predicted Angel. Morley agreed, adding that changes to the way people collaborate will be profound. A&O has been promoting wikis on the firm’s intranet for a some time — a move that has sparked informal communication with clients that has gone down well on both sides. “There is a very intuitive feel to this — the technology is less clunky and it is more obvious what to do,” said Morley. With clients increasingly demanding that their advisers share their knowledge with them, the use of wikis in this way seems set to explode in popularity.
The increasing embrace of IT, and its true embedding within the essence of what firms do, comes, I hasten to add, with one enormous challenge which no one to my knowledge has yet answered in a satisfactory way that might yield a long-term equilibrium solution: That challenge is commoditization.
Its sources are various, but primary among them:
In the online world, we increasingly expect information to be free; why should clients expect otherwise from their law firm?
Technology fuels arms races: If it is true that "among UK firms, however, there are a number of examples where firms have generated revenue through subscription-based, lawyer-light projects," then how long will it be before those services begin to invade practices higher up the value chain?
My view is more sanguine, primarily because I believe the phrase "commoditization" is flung around far too loosely and generates free-floating fear divorced from real-world implications. I'm closer to the position articulated by David Jabbari, Allen & Overy's head of knowledge management, who believes that “Clearly, any information that can be commoditised is going to be, and will be free,” but who also pointed out that we've known for a hundred years, since Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, how to efficiently build a car, and yet the auto industry is one of the most hotly competitive and least "commoditized" around.
Taking a more recent example, in concept few consumer electronics goods are more generic in nature than an MP3 player, but the iPod has turned the category on its head. Ultimately, the march of technology cannot—and should not—be resisted. Neil Attree, Beachcroft's head of IT, gets it right:
“If a piece of technology makes the kind of work you are going to do easier and better, then go for it. It is the packaging and the end product that matters, and that comes down to quality assurance.”
Meanwhile, over at The New York Times, the University of Chicago Graduate Business School economics professor Austin Goolsbee writes that "the US has kept the productivity playing field tilted to its advantage" through superior deployment of IT and its beneficent effect on productivity. He's not writing in the abstract, but reporting the results of a new study coming out of the Center for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics.
The context is, as usual, globalization and its discontents, and the question posed is whether the US will be able to succeed in an open world market or whether the feared competitive advantages of other nations would erode the US standard of living.
Now, as a general matter, economists (and I subscribe to this as well) believe in the theory of "convergence," which is a rather grand name for the common-sensical notion that since it's easier to copy something someone else came up with than to innovate on your own, eventually the laggards will tend to catch up with the leaders. The practical consequence of this is that the growth rate of the "laggards" may temporarily exceed that of the leaders, only to inevitably slow down once they catch up.
This brings us back to IT.
The London School of Economics study that Goolsbee discusses,
“Americans Do I.T. Better: U.S. Multinationals and the Productivity Miracle,” asks an intriguing question. Granted that there was a spike in US productivity in the late 1990's thanks to our rapid adoption of IT and the astonishing decline in costs of technology (30%/year by some accounts), why was—or was that?—unique to the US?
To try to answer this, the authors ask an ingenious question: Was there any evidence that the American advantage with information technology transfers to locations outside the United States? "If American companies turn computers into productivity better than anyone else, can businesses in Britain do the same when they are taken over by Americans?" After all, the price of IT assets fell precisely as fast in Europe as it did in the US, and it was just as readily available for sale. Yet there was no EU productivity miracle in the 1990's.
Here's the Abstract of the paper:
"The US has experienced a sustained increase in productivity growth since the mid-1990s, particularly in sectors
that intensively use information technologies (IT). This has not occurred in Europe. If the US “productivity
miracle” is due to a natural advantage of being located in the US then we would not expect to see any evidence
of it for US establishments located abroad. This paper shows in fact that US multinationals operating in the UK
do have higher productivity than non-US multinationals in the UK, and this is primarily due to the higher
productivity of their IT. Furthermore, establishments that are taken over by US multinationals increase the
productivity of their IT, whereas observationally identical establishments taken over by non-US multinationals
do not. One explanation for these patterns is that US firms are organized in a way that allows them to use new
technologies more efficiently."
As an example, Wal-Mart acquired the "middling fourth" supermarket chain in Britain, Asda, in 1999, after which it proceeded to grow smartly and is now #2. As tough as it can be to compete on a global stage, somehow the US seems more flexible and effective at adjusting as the landscape shifts. It's become a truism to observe that the rate of economic and technological change is accelerating. If you believe that (with exceptions, I do), then selection pressure will be exerted in favor of the more nimble and adaptable. Goolsbee concludes, tongue only half in cheek, with "something most Americans clearly understand: The world economy may be tough on your industry but look on the bright side: you could be French."
We need not endorse the notion of US IT triumphalism to conclude that IT, properly understood and deployed, can provide competitive advantage for individual firms.
This in turn brings us to a more strategic perspective on IT and its role in a firm. Here, the challenge is for the CIO to move the IT planning horizon from a single year to a multi-year perspective, and to move the focus of IT strategy from "supplier" to the firm to "alignment" with the firm to "competitive differentiator" of the firm. According to a Spring 2007 McKinsey survey of senior IT executives in North America, the basics are largely in place for IT to assume a truly strategic role. Whether they're actually taking advantage of that opportunity appears a closer question.
First, the good news:
83% say their company's IT strategy is developed collaboratively with business leaders.
CIO's are visible: 44% report directly to the CEO and another 42% (making 86% in total) report to the COO or CFO.
And the not so good news:
Only 43% say they are very or extremely effective at identifying areas where IT can add the most value.
A mere 34% say they are more effective in introducing new technologies than their competitors, and an almost equal 29% admit they are "not at all" better than their competitors in innovation.
This, then, leaves us with something of a paradox:
Leaders at the Legal Week technology summit underscored the critical role IT has to play in the 21st Century;
The Americans Do IT Better study provided further ammunition, if any were needed, to the belief that IT can be a competitive differentiator; and
McKinsey's survey tells us that CIO's by and large have the proverbial seat at the table—but that they're not exploiting it as effectively as they could.
I choose to view this not as a failing but as an opportunity.
The most forward-thinking proponents of Knowledge Management within firms are beginning to move the function from support of the firm's practice to support of the firm's strategy. The first—practice support—involves hygienic expertise in such things as sophisticated document management, "enterprise" (firm-wide) search, and cutting edge technological tools. But the latter—strategic business support—can bolster client-company and industry awareness, business development efforts, and client relations. It turns KM from inward and lawyer-facing to outward and client-facing.
One powerful way to open up your firm's KM function to clients is to introduce internally accessible and (carefully selected) client-accessible blogs and wikis, as is being done at Allen & Overy. These dynamic online fora can provide meeting places for practitioners with shared professional interests to virtually assemble and exchange viewpoints on the meaning of new developments in their area of expertise. If your firm has professional support lawyers, as the more sophisticated UK firms do, those PSL's can take a lead in such fora and move from a role of research and marshaller of precedent to analyst and provider of business and legal insight.
This moves the KM function from "on call" delivery of static repositories of information to interactive fora where opinions and perspectives can be cultivated and evolve. And this comes naturally to lawyers: How many times have you seen even the most senior people (especially the most senior people) drop whatever pressing matter they're pursuing to engage in a free-wheeling discussion of some new development whose immediate implications are difficult to discern?
If the leadership of your firm, from the chair or managing partner on down, endorses these social and professional experiments, imagine how far they could go. Ultimately, the goal is to unlock the expertise, both tacit and explicit, within your firm in transparent ways that clients will come to see as defining your true competitive distinction.
This is not your father's IT. And it's not a "commodity."
Could it be that "great teams are less productive?"
That's the headline that got my attention over at Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge.
As it turns out, there is understandable tension between "learning" and "performance," insofar as when you're learning something new you're probably not immediately very good at it. In other words, there's inherent tension between performance today (where you excel at doing what you've done before) and performance tomorrow (where, unless you're learning some new things now, you'll be behind the curve).
But back to the HBS research.
Prof. Amy Edmondson started her research in the context of hospitals, where tracking and analyzing "errors" has been raised to a high science. In hospitals, "errors" are an indispensable input to learning and organizational change. So Prof. Edmondson assumed that she would find a positive correlation between high-performance teams and low error rates.
She found the opposite: The more integrated, effective, and highly functional the team, the more error rates were reported.
And massaging the data in various ways only confirmed or amplified the result (for example, controlling for the severity of the patients' disease on the assumption that "better" teams might get harder cases just made the effect more pronounced). Then the eureka moment: In well-led teams, the climate of openness made it easier to report and discuss errors, as opposed to teams with weak or punitive leadership.
Good teams, in other words, didn't commit more mistakes, they recognized and recorded more mistakes.
If you're wondering how to transfer this from the operating room to the conference room, I have some thoughts:
Poor communication, or an environment dominated by bullies and narcissistic perfectionists, will ensure that everyone in sight devotes tremendous energy to ensuring that mistakes are not recognized, or are blamed on innocent bystanders if recognized, or are turned into exercises in obsequious self-abasement if recognized and tagged to their owner. A recipe for better performance next time? Not.
By contrast, a high-performing team, with a culture of openness and an "idea-friendly" approach, will acknowledge and make the most of "mistakes"—which, assuming beneficent intentions all around, are most likely just attempts to go the extra mile.
When I say "making the most" of mistakes, I should clarify what I mean. And to clarify that I need to explain that I think there are two fundamentally different categories of mistakes, or categories of learning opportunities, if you prefer:
Situations where someone fails at accomplishing a well-known task with ample precedents and a well-worn track record of success by others at different times and places. These are failures to understand precedent: To understand how to ride a bike, how to dance to a waltz in four-time, how to prepare for a deposition. The learning opportunity here is simply to put the unfortunate under the guidance of a more experienced senior and let mentoring do its magic
Then there are situations where the "mistake" is because we're in unknown territory and you tried something that plausible might have worked but didn't in reality. Here the learning opportunity is to de-brief, reanalyze what went wrong and what could have been done differently, and figure out how to do better next time.
Now, the question and the challenge for you as a senior manager is how to distribute the individual, high-performing, teams' learning across the firm.
Sometimes, of course, it can't be done: A new approach to summary judgment motions probably won't gain much traction with your tax lawyers. But you can still celebrate the innovations and signal that your firm rewards creative thinking.
But your most important job may be precisely to help others walks that fine line between high performance today and stasis tomorrow. "Learning" is opposed to "performance" only in the temporal sense. Learning today is an investment in performance tomorrow, but/and learning today distracts from performance today.
There's still one thing we know works: Open lines of communication. To identify mistakes as promptly as humanly possible, to diagnose the cause and apply the right "learning opportunity" paradigm, and to ceaselessly push into the future.
For the rest of you, if you haven't heard of Legal OnRamp, I intend to remedy that here and now. Consider what follows one small step in the unveiling of Legal OnRamp.
A collaborative service of leading law departments and law firms, it's intended to pool and build upon the knowledge and experience of these two key constituencies of the legal community and, by doing so, to provide a 21st Century tool to help get work done faster and with higher quality.
Ambitious? Yes, but taking a page from the finest and most venerable traditions of the legal profession, insofar as the goal is essentially to help lawyers and their clients collaborate more effectively. Ten years ago I embarked on an attempt to achieve a similar goal as CEO of the late Pro/Se Systems, Inc., which was designed to:
Bring together the combined legal content of willing members of the AmLaw 100—the tons and tons of client alerts, advisories, updates, briefing papers, backgrounders, presentations, etc., which is now sitting on shelves in 3-ring binders in major metropolitan areas—and digitize it, making it plain-text searchable;
With the Fortune 1000 as subscribers to this massive content repository, able in seconds to find the most germane articles addressing their legal question du jour.
In other words, bringing together supply (AmLaw 100) and demand (Fortune 1000) to provide a sophisticated online service for answering day to day legal questions all for the price of a subscription: "I own restricted (Rule 144) stock; what can I do with it?" "I have to fire a 60-year-old; what do I need to know?" You get the idea.
Legal OnRamp is that idea—and far far more—a decade later. For one thing, it's a reflection of how companies are doing things fundamentally differently now, with far deeper learning available from sectors outside the law such as CAD, web, and enterprise systems.
Here's just some of what it has to offer:
Content: FAQ's on the law, updates and publications from firms, "blogs from legal thought-leaders" (yours truly is a member), and standard forms and templates.
Community: Designed to facilitate communication and business deals between the members of "LOR," with forums and online discussions.
Collaboration: A way to get work done between outside lawyers and in-house professionals.
Other features include real-time flagging of who among the members of your personally selected community are currently online on the site ("Facebook" for lawyers), private and secure collaborative workspaces and wikis, with more to come.
Who's behind it?
Cisco, first of all, as foreshadowed in this earlier article of mine. But on the law firm side, some names you are familiar with:
Whether or not it will be as seminal and as ground-breaking as it aspirations, I think it's not too soon to say:
It's an idea whose time will come.
The odds of success today—for a host of reasons ranging from dirt-cheap servers and open-source software to more creative thinkers in our profession as a whole—beat those of a decade ago, with a stick.
It has deep-pocketed backers, a conservative growth model, and with its modest spending rate and some early revenue streams, can survive for a long time without needing to achieve escape velocity.
Part of my fascination with Legal OnRamp stems from an observation many have made about our profession: That law firms won't fundamentally change until clients demand it. Legal OnRamp invites firms to change—at least in some respects—in anticipation of where clients are going: To go where the puck will be, if you will.
If, like me, you're intensely curious about ways in which our profession can evolve, while staying true to its roots of placing client service front and center, you'll want to know about Legal OnRamp. I can tell you that it's a ride I've signed up for.
It can be a slippery concept, unusually prone to the "eye of the beholder" syndrome, but the uber -article about Web 2.0 was written by Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Publishing and one of the truly thoughtful writers about our evolving online world. Here are some of his thoughts about it:
Web 1.0
-->
Web 2.0
DoubleClick
-->
Google AdSense
Ofoto
-->
Flickr
Akamai
-->
BitTorrent
mp3.com
-->
Napster
Britannica Online
-->
Wikipedia
personal websites
-->
blogging
evite
-->
upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation
-->
search engine optimization
page views
-->
cost per click
screen scraping
-->
web services
publishing
-->
participation
content management systems
-->
wikis
directories (taxonomy)
-->
tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness
-->
syndication
Some of the key concepts O'Reilly posits as characteristics of Web 2.0 are:
The Web as a Platform
In Web 2.0, you don't "surf" or look at things on the Web; you do things on the Web, and Web 2.0 participants such as Google provide services
Harnessing Collective Intelligence
For example, eBay is essentially an enormous platform for enabling, categorizing, and collecting the joint activity of all of its users, and like the web itself, it grows organically in response to user activity.
Similarly, Amazon sells the same products as Barnesandnoble.com, with the same jacket photos, ISBN's, and Publisher's Weekly blurbs, but it has become extraordinarily adept at enabling visitors to contribute their own reviews, and to participate in a myriad of ways on virtually every page. Through a virtuous feedback loop, Amazon uses the visitors' contributions to, in turn, improve its search and recommendation functionality.
Most spectacular in this area are the successes of sites like Wikipedia, entirely a creature of visitor contributions, or flickr or del.icio.us. In a formulation at once cunning and appealing, this is known as the "architecture of participation."
Data is the Next Intel Inside
This signifies that every Web 2.0 initiative is tremendously data-dependent: Google, Amazon, MapQuest, mashups (if you don't know what a mashup is, go here, which combines, or mashes up, Craigslist apartment listings with Google maps—right, you just got the idea).
The End of the Software Release Cycle
Google is famous, or notorious, for constantly releasing new functions, or applications, in "beta." Sometimes they formally graduate from beta-adolescence, sometimes they disappear and sometimes they seem to remain in a sort of permanent beta purgatory.
I have often wondered when—but not whether—this will pose a bedrock challenge to Microsoft's business model.
O'Reilly has a few other candidates for characteristics of Web 2.0, which tend to be a bit more geeky ("lightweight programming models," "software above the level of a single device," and "rich user experience," for instance), but I think the point has been made.
Great. What has this got to do with you and your firm?
The usual suspect, McKinsey, has fingered Web 2.0 for a survey on how global businesses are using it. With nearly 3,000 respondents, 44% C-level executives, the survey essentially constitutes a widespread, but careful, endorsement of Web 2.0 in corporate land. Some numbers:
Asked how satisfied they are with the financial return on their investment in Web 2.0 technologies over the past five years:
More than half are pleased
Three-quarters plan to maintain or increase investments in the coming years
Only 13% say they are disappointed
Interestingly, those who described themselves as "early adopters" were more satisfied than those deeming themselvse "fast followers." This confirms my own personal prejudice that in technology investments, speed is a virtue.
Separately, McKinsey asked the classic "hindsight" question: Knowing what you know today, what might you have done differently to make your investments in Web 2.0 technologies more effective?:
Invested at the right time but didn't invest enough: 42%
Should have invested sooner: 24%
Would do nothing different: 18%
Invested at the right time but over-estimated potential: 10%
Should have waited for technology to mature further: 7%
Back to what exactly "Web 2.0" means in the business context: The most popular application is "Web services," which McKinsey defines as follows:
"Web services are software systems that make it easier for different systems to communicate with one another automatically in order to pass information or conduct transactions. For example, a retailer and supplier might use Web services to communicate over the Internet and automatically update each other's inventory systems."
In law firm land, one of the truly useful applications of "Web services" I've seen is the knowledge management system of an AmLaw 25 firm that draws from essentially every database in the firm—not just the document management or matter management systems—so that if you find (say) a brief of particular interest, you have simultaneous on-screen links to every pertinent piece of data related to that brief, from the lawyers who authored it to the client for whom it was generated, the number of hours billed against it, the office and practice group it emanated from, etc.
"Web services" are in use at 80% of companies surveyed.
Second is "collective intelligence," at 48% of firms, meaning methods of enabling online collaboration, for example by allowing multiple authors to edit a document in one space.
"Peer to peer networking," which enables efficient sharing of a file over the Net or to a selected group, by distributing copies of the file across many machines, was in use by 47% of firms responding.
After that, the remaining technologies were all used by between one-quarter and one-third of firms responding: These included social networking, RSS feeds, podcasts, wikis, blogs, and mashups.
But let's not exaggerate the penetration of these techniques: Very few report that their companies are using three or more of these techniques, and more than a third labeled the entire sector "experimental."
Still, among firms using them, the benefits seem clear: The key objective is to communicate more effectively and efficiently with customers, business partners (e.g., suppliers), as well as internally (think KM).
Is any of this a surprise?
Yes: Because the key source of dissatisfaction with Web 2.0 applications seemed to be adopting them too late, not too soon.
But no: Because business (as law) is all about effective communication with the people who matter: Your clients, suppliers, and your own colleagues within the firm.
"Web 2.0" is not, conceived that way, novel in the least. It's simply another way to communicate. If communicating is key, Web 2.0 is here to stay.
This morning I delivered the keynote at the Ark Group's two-day conference starting here in New York, "Best Practices & Management Strategies for Legal Library & Information Service Centers."
My keynote was titled "The Law Library of the Future," and I want to share some it with you. But before I do: Many thanks to the organizers of the conference, as well as to the many attendees I had the opportunity to speak with (some of whom I knew and some of whom were new). Here's how the conference materials summarized my presentation:
9:15AM KEYNOTE: The Library of the Future
As information resources are increasingly delivered in digital format and online, and as new generations of lawyers show increasing preference for, and adeptness at, employing powerful search technologies to engage in “self-service” research, the role of the law library in the 21st Century is seen by many as threatened. Indeed, comparing the physical footprint of a library designed ten years ago to one planned for tomorrow will show drastic down-sizing and profound functional changes. In light of these trends, many are questioning whether the library can maintain its central role in the life of a firm.
However, what law firms sell is knowledge; and libraries, above all, are purveyors of knowledge. Therefore, the library of the future will move from a tactical to a strategic resource, from a static repository to dynamic, on-demand portal, from one-way delivery of assets to vibrant communities of practice, and from a “one size fits all” commodity to a focused, adaptive resource tailored to the precise needs of your firm today.
Libraries are environments for learning, and human beings learn through conversations within their social networks. This means that the mission of the library of the future is to sustain and foster these social communities. The implications of this are that libraries move to the forefront of a firm’s knowledge management initiatives, that to provide the on-demand, highly targeted answers lawyers are relentlessly seeking, effective libraries will adopt Web 2.0 techniques, and that libraries will become increasingly central to differentiating a firm from its competitive set, and providing strategic advantage in the marketplace.
Bruce MacEwen
AdamSmith, Esq.
Let me flesh out what I talked about.
I opened by telling the (true) story of walking through an AmLaw 25's library with a junior and a senior partner, examining the space given to the library
with an eye towards reconfiguring it for the firm's pending move to new offices:
Junior Partner (adamantly): "We need to get rid of all of this." Senior Partner (wistfully): "Well, maybe not all of it...."
The fact remains that:
The books are going away (nearly two-thirds of firms surveyed by The American Lawyer last year had cancelled West reporter subscriptions). And
The space is going away. New offices designed today never feature the "monumental" library behind plate glass off the reception area. In fact, one of the leading commercial real estate brokers in the country (in terms of law firm clientele) told me just last week that space planners' biggest worry about the library area is not that it will be too small but that it will be too big. To hedge their bets, new library areas are planned in advance to be flexible enough to be able to serve other functions, such as litigation "war rooms."
In general, the model for the new library is not the reading room at the Library of Congress or the British Museum, but: Starbucks. In other words, not the sacrosanct temple, but the drop-in, get away from the phone, casual environment ideal for reading in solitude or meeting informally to sling ideas around.
In pursuing this type of model, librarians need to understand that they are dealing with four generations of lawyers in terms of attitudes towards media, technology, and research. This is roughly how I characterized it:
Traditionalists/ -Silent Generation
Boomers
Gen X
Millennial's
Born <1946
1946—64
1965—81
1982—2000
Patriotic, loyal, risk-averse
Idealistic, competitive, driven
Self-reliant, skeptical, risk- takers
Civic-minded, collaborative, realistic
Case reporters, treatises
law reviews, mainstream legal periodicals, Google
work product of trusted colleagues, focused legal online resources
blogs, RSS aggregators, Wikipedia
ABC, CBS, NBC
CNN, PBS
Fox, MTV, Comedy Central
YouTube
Letters
voice-mail
email
IM, SMS
Reflecting on this topic spurred me to look up one of my favorite quotes on attitudes toward technology, which comes from Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy:
"Anything that is in the world when you were born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural way the world works.
"Anything that is invented between the time when you are 15 to 35 is new, revolutionary, and exciting, and you can possibly get a career in it.
"Anything invented after you are 35 is against the natural order of things."
Still, it remains the case that while the books may have gone away, the demand for knowledge has not—if anything, the demand is more voracious than ever. This is actually good news for librarians, if they can transform their role from passive custodians of information to active champions of knowledge resources. I portray it as follows:
20th Century
21st Century
Information was scarce, hard to find, a treasured resource
Information is ubiquitous, overwhelming, impossible to sift through
Requiring professional trained searchers to locate it ("librarians")
Requiring sophisticated guidance to find the needle in the haystack ("librarians")
Status conferred by shelf-feet of books, grandeur of space
Status confirmed by "a seat at the table" in key law firm activities
Isolated from the firm
Integral to the firm
Ultimately, I believe the law library of the future is Knowledge Management. If I'm right, this is terrific news for librarians who can adapt themselves to this role and ensure that the conversation with the executive committee about resource allocation is cast in terms of scholarship, professional development, client and business intelligence, and competitive advantage through astutely marshalling the firm's intellectual assets: And not in terms of overhead, square footage, the price of subscriptions, headcount, and non-fee-earners.
If so, the library of the future will evolve:
from a tactical to a strategic resource
from static repository to dynamic, on-demand portal
from one-way delivery of assets to home for communities of practice, and
from a "one size fits all" commodity to an adaptive resource tailored to the needs of your firm today.
Such was my message, in any event, for those willing to re-imagine the the library's fundamental purpose, its clientele, the services it offers, and the firm's level of satisfaction with those services.
Update: 22 Feb.: Stephen Rosenberg of The McCormack Firm, LLC (Boston) wrote me with the following thoughts which he has given me permission to publish:
"Adam [he knows my name is actually Bruce], have long enjoyed your posts (long being a relative term in light of when the age of blogging dawned), but today's post was the first to provoke me to comment. Yesterday I posted an essay on the death of the law review, arguing that new sources of information - and the preference of younger lawyers to use them over traditional library sources - were replacing them in terms of relevance and usefulness. The post is at: http://www.bostonerisalaw.com/archives/people-are-talking--law-reviews-are-dead-they-just-dont-know-it-yet.html.
"Your post today seems to make the same point, only on more of a macro level: that technology is and will completely transform the entire legal research model, eliminating the old fashioned library in its entirety, and not just, as per my post yesterday, law reviews (at least if they do not change their DNA in a manner that allows them to join the on-line interactive world)."
I agree with Stephen entirely. Indeed, I would submit that if your firm has not yet "re-engineered" your library, your peers who have are in a position to steal a march.
October 1, 2009 5:02 PM
