KM helps reshape the practice of law

KM may not be the hottest topic in legal trade publications, but efficiency and standardization are. Floyd says, "There is a real paradigm shift going on in how we practice and that is front and center to partners, and it all touches on KM. I take a long-term view-five to 10 years from now. I am trying to put us in a position where we can be ready and nimble to make moves on our own terms rather than because we are being forced to."

Ginevra Saylor, national director of knowledge management, Dentons Canada

Ginevra Saylor says the legal KM situation has evolved differently in Canada than in the United States. Ten years ago, there was more legal KM activity in Canada and in the United Kingdom than in the United States. KM took off in the early 2000s in the big Toronto firms, she says. KM departments grew to four or five people plus software developers. Today at Dentons Canada she leads a team of 21 that includes business intelligence, a webmaster and law library staff. "I don't see the momentum slowing down. It is entrenched now, and smaller boutique firms are joining the larger firms in having KM departments," she explains. "The larger U.S. firms got started a little later but have caught up, and in many cases have moved ahead of Canadian counterparts. Many have made investments in interesting technology, including client-facing solutions."

Saylor sits on the KM steering committee of the International Legal Technology Association (iltanet.org), and finds its meetings are quite valuable for sharing ideas. "It is a real show and tell of both the good and bad of implementations and process changes," she says. "It's funny that some firms are concerned about KM staff sharing their experience because they see it as a competitive advantage. If they knew how often the attendees go back to their firm with an interesting idea and nobody listens to them, they would rest much easier."

An attorney herself, Saylor believes people generally think with a KM mindset or they don't. When she was practicing, her office had very little in the way of automation, but she was always thinking of how to organize her work more efficiently by creating checklists and forms. She worked at another two-office, Toronto-based law firm as KM leader for several years before joining Dentons, which had six offices coast to coast. She was looking forward to the challenges involved in that when through mergers Dentons became a global firm with five regional entities. Now the challenge is that the regions have very different levels of KM experience. Some have almost nothing; others like Canada and the United Kingdom are much further along. "So we are looking at how to keep that regional activity going and at the same time figure out what makes sense to do globally," she says.

In the evolution of legal KM, there was at first a heavy focus on the collection of material that can be repurposed and embedding non-practice lawyers to do research and analysis of the law and share that with the group, Saylor says. That evolved to enterprise search, portals and client-facing solutions. Now it is moving to law practice project management-a focus on the business of law.

"Not only is the back office getting streamlined and less costly, that same thinking is being applied to the front office," she says. "KM is delivering the message that the current model isn't working well. We always hear that change management and culture are hard in the legal field. This is a very tough area in which to get responsiveness from attorneys, because you are addressing how they do their jobs, and they can be really touchy about it and resistant. They were reluctantly willing to accept the introduction of technology into practice, but if you tell them that there are ways we could get more accurate information and get better results for clients, they don't take well to that. But the game changer is that they are hearing from their clients that the clients want these kinds of changes made."