Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/34417
over time as leaders leave or lose interest, and the local focus of these initiatives tends to work against solving firmwide challenges. Also, following the path of other firms may not address your firm’s unique needs and business environment. By developing a KM strategy tailored for your firm, you can clearly articulate your firm’s current and future KM priorities, articulate the expected business benefits and create plans of action for those priorities. The process of creating a KM strategy builds two essential components of long- term success: lawyer awareness and support. STRATEGIC CHALLENGES Different times and different markets call for different KM solutions. KM has gone through three major evolutions that have mirrored know-how, current awareness and professional development. “The process of creating a KM strategy builds two essential components of long-term success: lawyer awareness and support.” changes in the legal marketplace. The first ran throughout most of the 20th century. In the “good old days,” with technology in its infancy, a major challenge for lawyers was finding information. KM responded to a firm’s focus on improving the quality of its legal services by creating, harvesting, organizing and publishing information, sometimes through technology and sometimes through “knowledge intermediaries” (a.k.a., professional support lawyers (PSLs) and other KM professionals). During this period, the focus of KM was on the basics that continue to be important today: legal The boom years for KM ran up through 2008 as market demand for legal services was growing at double-digit rates, firms grew, billing rates increased, and firms focused on business development and positioning their practices to grab a bigger piece of the growing legal pie. This era also saw a much higher mobility among lawyers as partners started to switch firms more often and took cadres of associates with them. The emphasis on the billable hour undermined cost justifications for KM based on improvements in efficiency. At the same time, information overload became the norm and powerful new KM-enabling technologies emerged, such as enterprise search, portals and social media. The challenges for KM became how to support and help integrate the growing firm and how to manage the information overload. The KM service portfolio expanded to include client-facing initiatives and support for business development activities. In addition, search was used more extensively to mine knowledge resources from existing data stores and to find expertise more easily within the growing firm. As a result, the PSL role evolved beyond the “practice of law” to become more tied to the www.iltanet.org Knowledge Management 23