ILTA White Papers

www.iltanet.org KM Financials and People Resources KM departments seem to have held on to their budgets over the last two years with 71% of respondents reporting that their budgets stayed the same. This is more optimistic than two years ago when only 64% had budgets that remained the same. KM teams haven't been hit as hard as people expected two years ago. In 2010, 21% of respondents expected the size of their teams to slightly decrease. However, this year, two-thirds of responding organizations indicated that the overall size of their teams stayed the same. And respondents seem fairly optimistic that their teams will either remain the same or slightly increase over the next two years. However, those teams are still pretty lean. About 37% of organizations have 0 to 1 full-time KM equivalent. This is about the same as two years ago. There has been a slight increase in the number of organizations with 1.5 to 5 FTEs in KM and a slight decrease in organizations with more than 10 FTEs. This time around, we revised the questions about the KM team to try and get a bit more specific information about the make-up of the teams. This told us that 24% of organizations have between 1.5 and 3 attorneys dedicating at least half of their time to KM. Almost half of the respondents have no attorneys dedicated to KM. The numbers are pretty similar with respect to technology staff with 45% of organizations having no technology staff on the KM teams. However, that means 53% have one or more technology staff members and, of that group, 5% have more than 5. All of which goes to show that KM professionals are skilled collaborators who draw on resources from practicing attorneys and members of other departments to get projects done. Matter Management One of the hottest topics in law firm management is alternative fee arrangements and legal project 8 ILTA White Paper management. KM appears to play a significant role in this area. In the survey question on functions and responsibilities, there has been a significant increase in KM roles and responsibilities related to fee-estimate tools, tools to support fixed-price offerings and other AFA- and project-planning tools. New questions added this year give us a picture of the kinds of tools firms are developing in this area, with the most common being budget templates for different types of matters. Priorities Two years ago, the most common priorities were new portal implementations (or upgrades), enterprise search, the development of a KM strategy and DMS implementations. This year, enterprise search and new portal implementations (or upgrades) are still at the top. But the next two highest priorities are precedent systems and internal marketing of KM resources — priorities that seem to have teams going back to the basics. The full survey results, including a summary of additional responses to some questions, are available below. We hope you find them useful. —Mara Nickerson of Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP

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