Legal Research

KM workshop - blogpost

Earlier last month I decided it was time to stop asking these questions and instead get some answers, so when a Knowledge Management course appeared on the lis-law mailing list I was eager to attend. I was also fortunate enough to be awarded a bursary from BIALL?s Awards and Bursaries Committee, (for which I am extremely grateful!), and so I found myself booked into a full-day course on Knowledge Management, run by Helene Russell from The Knowledge Business. 

We covered a huge amount of material in just one day, and rather than detail it piecemeal, I want instead to highlight the aspects that resonated most with me: what is meant by ?knowledge?, why it is valuable and worth curating, and what is needed in order to ?manage? it.

Knowledge is, unsurprisingly, what people know. But this rather obvious statement hides a much more nuanced picture. Knowledge is the experience people have, the mistakes they have learnt from, the insight they?ve gained. It does include knowledge of a subject (hence the overlap with library resources) and it also covers documents, such as contracts that have been drafted or forms that have been used in a particular deal. However, I think we underestimate the amount of knowledge acquired simply through experience. Knowledge is more than just information ? it is information coupled with insight. For example, a brand-new trainee might diligently check all the law databases for a particular case and not find it, but an experienced librarian might realise there is a mistake in the citation or that this particular case series is actually filed under Journals, not Cases. The librarian has used their previous experience and knowledge of this kind of data to answer the query successfully, and so this kind of insight is extremely valuable.

The value of experience isn?t just restricted to research either. It also encompasses knowledge gained on particular people or clients. A partner who has worked on a particular deal has gained knowledge not only of that transaction, but of the clients involved, the people who are easy or hard to work with, the culture of the organisation and a hundred other things besides. All that experience could be very useful in future deals with the client or working on a similar transaction. 

Unfortunately this type of knowledge is also extremely difficult to capture. If that member of staff leaves, they take all their insight and experience with them. I don?t know about you, but there are times when I would struggle to explain precisely how I answered a lawyer?s query. There are times when I tried something out, followed a hunch, chose a particular route to go down. Perhaps something felt right or wrong, and that influenced my next move. A combination of approaches led me to a clue, and somehow I found what they needed. It is my experience that comes into play here, not a particular document or database. 

So how do you capture information that lives primarily in people?s heads? How do you get that knowledge, acquired by individuals, to flow around the business so that everyone can benefit? 

Helene stressed that a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that knowledge management is the same as IT: throw a big computer system at the problem and that will fix it. Actually IT is only part of the solution, working well for some types of knowledge but not for others. For example, document storage is usually best served these days by IT. As long as useful metadata is applied in a  consistent and careful fashion, a databank of documents, such as previously-drafted contracts or templates, is a good way to avoid reinventing the wheel for every new transaction (hence the overlap with cataloguing). It is also fairly easy to capture this information ? after a deal, all documentation relating to the deal can be sifted and uploaded as appropriate.

However, some knowledge does not fit into a system such as this. The hunches on a particular type of search, for example, or the understanding about how a particular client works is just not suited to this kind of database. Furthermore, it is very difficult to get people to tell you everything they learnt on a
transaction ? this kind of information tends to come through in dribs and drabs, during a conversation for example. 

This means that knowledge management needs to encompass a range of approaches. The document system works well for that particular kind of knowledge. But other kinds of knowledge are more easily shared face-to-face or via a conversation. This can be as simple as a post-project meet-up to review how the project went, or a breakfast meeting once a month to hear what other parts of the business are doing. People will volunteer information in the course of a conversation and might be prompted to recall something important more easily in this setting. 

I would highly recommend Helene as a trainer. The course was jam-packed with information and clearly presented. I also found it very valuable to draw on Helene?s background as a commercial lawyer - she understood the business environment and was able to use examples I could relate directly to my workplace. I now have a thorough grounding in knowledge management and came away from the course with lots of ideas to explore back in my office. 

My sincere thanks to the Awards and Bursaries Committee for making my attendance on the course possible.

Contributed by: Helen Doyle | Information Officer | Norton Rose Fulbright LLP

Full post as published by The BIALL Blog on November 01, 2016 (boomark / email).