May
9
Mary Byrne
Australian law
firms are way ahead of their counterparts in the United States when it comes
to knowledge management but there is still room for improvement, according
to a senior IT adviser to the legal profession.
Gretta Rusanow is the chief executive of Curve Consulting, which provides
technology consulting services to US and Australian law firms.
Rusanow says most top-tier and mid-level Australian law firms already have
a knowledge management system in place, which typically consists of a number
of discreet systems, including a financial management system, a document management
system, a precedent document system, a litigation support system, an intranet,
best practice work product repositories, e-mail, groupware, CD ROM and online
services, as well as an internal research database.
But Rusanow says these systems do not manage what she calls "tacit knowledge",
which includes staff expertise and experience.
"If you are a senior partner with 15 years' experience, when you bring
in a two-year lawyer, how are you ensuring that they're getting the correct
level of training from you so that in 10 years's time they, too, are a good
practitioner?" she says. "At the moment it's so ad hoc."
Rusanow says tacit knowledge is
not shared across law firms because many are run as separate business units,
rather than as a national firm.
"Clients go to national law firms just presuming that if I pass on a
piece of information in Brisbane then surely that's filtering through the
organisation. And that just doesn't happen," she says.
Rusanow recommends using the intranet to develop training programs and "communities
of interest" to aid knowledge sharing across the firm. Communities of
interest are informal networks of lawyers across different practice areas
and geographical locations.
"The most effective way you can use technology to capture tacit knowledge
is to build a skills and expertise locator so that you can put the right people
in contact with one another," Rusanow says.
But she says Australia is ahead of the US in knowledge management: "There
is a disproportionate amount of large prestigious law firms in Australia and
I think it's caused them to be highly competitive."