The future of knowledge management: out of the library into the front line

Ian Mason and Rob Martin of Thomson Reuters explore the new KM landscape.

What is knowledge management?

In its early days, some may have viewed knowledge management (KM) as a dry, back-office function. It was often confined to the law library (and predominantly practised there, away from the fee-earning frontline). Lawyers kept their precedents safely locked away in their files or drawers. They might be incentivised to share precedents in an annual precedent hunt with a bottle of champagne or similar prize for the best template produced. But that was as exciting as it got.

An early definition of knowledge management from the Gartner Group (Duhon, 1998), is as follows: ‘Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving and sharing all of an enterprise’s information assets. These assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously uncaptured expertise and experience in individual workers.’

KM is big business

In recent years, KM has become big business, both for law firms, their clients and the suppliers of knowhow, like Practical Law. Many law firms have realised that effective knowhow can improve and create value, revenue and efficiency. Knowhow is highly valued by clients and clients expect law firms to share their knowhow with them outside transactions or cases as part of an ongoing arrangement. In pitches for panels, clients expect law firms to explain, almost as a matter of course, how they will share their knowhow: what legal updates will be provided, what seminars the clients will be able to attend… Many law firms have developed client portals to facilitate the sharing of knowhow.

The growth of KM has been reflected by changing and expanding roles in law firms to service it. Black-letter law in printed books sitting in law libraries, maintained by specialist law librarians was, and remains, a traditional and valued source of knowhow. But as knowhow expanded and became more complex, new roles developed for specialist professional support lawyers (PSLs). These were (and are) experienced former practising lawyers, technical experts in their subject disciplines and on top of the latest legal developments. Over the past few years, PSL roles have evolved and expanded. Some of the largest law firms now boast global directors of KM, or chief knowledge officers. These are wide-ranging, significant and strategic roles within law firms. Directors of KM are expected to help their firms to demonstrate thought leadership to their clients and peer group. These roles simply did not exist within law firms ten years ago, or even five years ago. The importance of these roles shows that law firms have recognised that KM is not just a cost, but has the ability to improve profitability and help to attract clients.

The growth of Practical Law

Knowhow suppliers have expanded and transformed their services to reflect the explosion of legal knowhow. The history of the development of Practical Law is a good case study to illustrate this. Practical Law was set up in 1990 by Chris Millerchip and Rob Dow, two former Slaughter and May lawyers. ‘We created the thing that we wanted when we were practising,’ stated Millerchip, enshrining the clear practical link between knowhow and translation into legal practice, which has always characterised Practical Law. The first product was PLC Magazine, which remains popular with customers. In 2000, PLC Magazine was published online. In 2001, Practical Law launched its first online knowhow service, Practical Law Property. This was followed by a corporate online service in 2002, and a succession of services in other areas, including IP and IT, competition (2003), employment (2005), financial services, finance, environment (2006), pensions, tax, dispute resolution (2007), private client, public sector, construction (2008), commercial (2009) and family (2014). Practical Law now has around 20 practice areas, and the latest service, Financial and Corporate Crime (FCC), will launch in 2015. The expansion of Practical Law practice areas closely mirrors the demand for legal advice in those areas and FCC will meet the growing demand for knowhow on investigations, corporate and related director liability. Compliance and risk management will be an important aspect of FCC and regulatory risk is one of the highest areas of concern for corporate.

As well as progressively adding new practice areas, Practical Law has also evolved to offer new types of knowhow-related service. In 2012, Practical Law Ask was established. This provides the opportunity for subscribers to pose questions and queries to the Ask editorial team, many of them recent former practitioners in their practice area, included as part of the Practical Law service. The Ask service has been hugely successful – the numbers of questions having grown exponentially in recent years – and is highly valued by customers. Other innovations include FastDraft (2005), an automated drafting tool to simplify and accelerate the drafting of documents, and What’s Market (2008), a searchable database of corporate transactions, including initial public offerings, public M&A deals, secondary issues and reorganisations.

As law firms and their clients have become more global, knowhow has developed to reflect this and become more internationally focused, rather than (for UK lawyers) just focused on the UK. Multi-jurisdictional guides on specific topics were introduced in 1999. Practical Law US was launched in 2008 and Practical Law China, a service aimed at lawyers doing China deals globally, was launched in 2013.

Knowhow must be supported by comprehensive and integrated information assets

Thomson Reuters Legal’s Practical Law customers are supported by Westlaw UK and Lawtel for legislation, case reporting, Sweet & Maxwell legal commentary and analysis, but we recognise and understand that we must continue to go further to support integration of our content with that of the firm, with their business systems, legal processes and indeed other essential resources.

Integration and sharing all of an enterprise’s assets is a key component in successful KM strategies and the challenges faced by firms today are very different to those of the past.

Information asset integration: This is the bedrock upon which an effective KM strategy can be built. The challenge today is that information assets reside in multiple internal systems, online subscription services, government and other agency services, social media, news services, and client and competitor websites, among many other systems. Technologies that support integration of these assets include enterprise search, federated search, intranets, client extranets, current awareness, alerting and aggregation services. To be effective, such technologies must be deployed so that all information is available in a manner that supports the specific needs of the firm, the different practice groups, the different jurisdictions and right down to the individual lawyer needs. It is the understanding of these needs that is critical to success and this is the key role that library, information management and KM teams play. KM remains a business issue and not an IT one; it requires cultural and business process change to be really effective.

When considering integration in the context of the Gartner Group definition of KM, firms need to go beyond just integration and sharing of information assets to embedding these assets in essential legal and business processes.

Legal and business process integration: Lawyers need to be free to apply their skills and expertise to support the delivery of high-quality, timely and affordable legal services and advice. To achieve this, systems and business processes need to be integrated with the appropriate information assets that are required at each stage. Expecting a lawyer to disconnect from the process to go and find information is time-consuming and prone to risk, or potentially a reduction in the quality of service delivered.

At Thomson Reuters Legal Solutions, we will be increasingly joining up our Practical Law knowhow with our research resources to provide an integrated experience for our customers. Furthermore we are continuing to invest in the software technologies, such as Solcara Legal Search and Solcara Know How, advanced drafting and legal workflow solutions, and a new legal bulletin production and alerting solution, Bulletin Pro. Our objective is to help bind information assets with core legal and business processes, the result of which can help to transform the way in which legal services are delivered. This transformation has the potential to: improve quality; reduce costs; minimise risk; and increase margins, while retaining staff and engaging them in more valuable and interesting work.

Some predictions for the future of knowhow

While no-one can predict the future with any certainty, particularly given the rapidly changing nature of the legal industry, we offer below some suggestions on how knowhow might develop:

1. Knowhow will continue to expand in scale and complexity, and knowhow roles will continue to develop to meet this need. This trend will not be reversed.
2. Knowhow will not just be about legal knowledge. There is a growing demand for information about particular sectors, industry developments and other news that can be used for business development purposes. This will give law firms, and their clients, with knowledge about their industry peer group, a competitive edge above and beyond pure legal knowhow.
3. Knowhow will expand into related areas. For example, many law firms are examining and formulating legal workflows, often in collaboration with clients, and re-engineering typical legal processes to reduce costs and improve profitability. Legal project management is another hot topic that is being introduced by law firms and in-house counsel. Law firms will increasingly act as project managers in transactions, rather than this being led by banks or accounting firms. The emphasis, and the expectation from clients, will be on legal solutions to provide the answers and the broader business solution, rather than just the legal advice.
4. Automation of knowhow and the development of software tools to facilitate the searching, collation and communication of knowhow, will continue.
5. Knowhow will increasingly be about integration and open systems. This means that information assets will need to be combined and integrated with all essential business and legal processes to ensure firms remain competitive in an ever-changing legal landscape.