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basic agreements and preparing deal documents. This perspective has tremendous merit as these non-law firm providers could, and will, eventually disrupt a significant part of the legal industry’s existing business model. Large law firms need not concede defeat, however, especially if they are willing to leverage knowledge management. THE TRANSCENDENT ROLE OF KM One of the reasons that large law firms should not readily abandon the notion that they can perform both types of legal services is that the line between commodity and premium work is constantly evolving as legal practice and the marketplace for legal services change. Indeed, as Richard Susskind observed in The End of Lawyers?, there will continue to be rightward pressure — from the individualized, bespoke model of legal service delivery to the more advanced commoditized model — due to client demand, competitive pressures from alternative legal service models, and even from within large firms as they seek to perform flat fee arrangements efficiently and profitably. This inexorable evolution toward efficiency is actually the sweet spot for KM professionals. Those who remain bogged down in performing what has traditionally been labeled commodity work — automating transactional documents, creating knowledge databases, cataloging precedent documents, and the like — sell short the value of knowledge management. Knowledge management can and must play a critical role in enabling firms to compete for and deliver more effective types of legal services beyond the world of transactional documents. KM professionals must be at the forefront of helping law firms re-evaluate how they handle every type of legal engagement in order to derive greater efficiencies 34 Knowledge Management ILTA White Paper and enhance profitability in a world of changing pressures. The KM approach implemented by our firm, Littler Mendelson, P.C., is a good example. AN OPPORTUNITY FOR KM TO ADDRESS A REAL BUSINESS NEED At the beginning of 2010, a Littler shareholder (partner) approached our firm’s KM team with an opportunity: one of the firm’s larger clients had solicited its outside counsel to submit proposals to substantially reduce the client’s overall legal spend. The shareholder embraced this as an opportunity to explore ways of becoming more efficient so that the firm could actually increase the volume of work it performs for the client while simultaneously reducing the client’s overall spend. At the time, Littler was handling about 25 percent of the client’s administrative agency charges in a small number of jurisdictions. In employment law, administrative agency charges are charges filed by individuals with federal or state agencies, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Department of Labor, or their state and local counterparts, alleging discrimination or harassment, wage claims or other violations by their employers of federal, state or local laws. The shareholder wanted to propose to the client that the firm would handle all of their administrative agency charges nationwide — well over 1,000 charges annually — on a flat-fee, per-charge basis. The shareholder was not interested in proposing solutions that reduced costs but risked sacrificing quality, such as pushing the work down to lower-rate associates or outsourcing to off-shore, third-party providers. He also was not interested in doing this work as a loss leader in the hopes of gaining additional higher margin work.