Gretta Rusanow Knowledge Management needs the partners' backing.
Photo: Paul Jones

In June, Minter Ellison started a customised intranet, called "daily tools for trade", for its litigation lawyers. Its intranet contains information on clients, industries, precedents and who in the firm has worked on what. Rymer plans another four or five intranets in the next few months, plus training for lawyers on teamwork and the profitability of work offered by specific clients. Rymer's appointment to Minter Ellison is part of the latest trend in the legal profession: knowledge management. He came to the firm a year ago from running Coca-Cola Amatil's strategic planning, information technology and market research divisions in Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia.
Knowledge management is not a new idea for law firms; they have used sophisticated precedents databases and libraries for years. What is new is the growing push for acceptance of knowledge management as an integral part of the way a law firm runs its business, rather than as an isolated administrative function.

Two national law firms, Freehills and Mallesons Stephen Jaques, recently appointed knowledge management partners, signalling a cultural change in attitudes to knowledge management, from support role to core business. Graham Seldon, a manager in the Mahlab Professionals division of Mahlab Recruitment, says law firms' recruitment of knowledge management workers has tripled in the past six months.

Seldon says law firms went through a similar change about five years ago, when marketing began to be taken seriously. "Initially, they just saw marketing as events, brochures and Web sites," he says. "Then it became more strategic, and moved into client development and business development."

Similarly, law firms saw knowledge management in its earlier phases as little more than a storehouse of precedents and opinions, once held in rows of filing cabinets and then in online databases.
Now, Seldon says, the approach is much broader. "It is not just about getting the document right or collecting all the information. That is under control. Now they realise there is so much more. It is fine to have really good precedents, but for proper knowledge management you need cultural change towards sharing ideas and knowledge."

Consultant Gretta Rusanow agrees that knowledge management is being taken far more seriously, but there is still a fair way to go. In April, Rusanow's firm, Curve Consulting, completed a six-month survey and analysis of 16 big law firms in Australia, the United States and Britain, exploring their views on knowledge management.
Rusanow says the survey's key finding was that there is still a gap between the new breed of knowledge-management professionals invading law firms, and many of the law partners.

"The knowledge-management directors are terribly articulate about how it is a key business driver and they want to improve client service and generate efficiencies," she says. "But there is still a bit of disconnect between them and the firm's management. To do well, knowledge management needs heavy investment from the partners, and their full commitment."

The difficulty, Rusanow says, is to present hard evidence of the value of knowledge management. Lawyers who are schooled in the hourly billing model - in which more time spent on a file means more revenue - can find it hard to grapple with notions of efficiency and active generation of work.

Rusanow contrasts this approach with her experience working in management consulting firms in the US, where a strong culture of knowledge sharing has emerged. At the end of each project, the consultants held a debriefing session to discuss the methodology used, the lessons learnt, ways in which the job could have been done better and what information could be applied to help other consultants or clients.

Minter's Rymer plans to introduce similar debriefing sessions, or "post-matter reviews", for the firm's lawyers. He says: "We will be asking: What did we learn, what should we communicate to the rest of the firm, what goes on the precedents database? And did we make any money?"