Knowledge Management Improves Business Flow

(KM) is the process of capturing, developing, sharing, and effectively using organizational knowledge. KM cuts across all legal practice areas. It can and should be relevant to the individual employee, the legal practice team, and the entire organization.

Our most valuable resource is the legal knowledge that underpins the service we deliver. All lawyers are expected to bring their expertise to the table, but the demands of a modern legal department require more. Clients are challenging lawyers to be more innovative, more creative, more economical, and more proactive than ever before.

RBC General Counsel Group approaches knowledge management through six main services:

1. Document and matter management
2. Precedent management
3. Legal research
4. Professional development
5. Current awareness
6. Global connectivity

The degree to which each service applies to individuals and teams will vary, but the right mix can increase productivity across the board.

Whether just starting out, or a veteran in the legal trenches, the tools and processes of knowledge management drive effective performance. Seeking guidance from well-designed information sources leads to insights that can often be applied immediately to the problem at hand or at least stored for use in future. Help can come in many forms and often combines elements of people, process, and technology — the foundations of knowledge management.

RBC Law Group’s KM journey

The knowledge management journey for RBC Law Group started in a very traditional manner.* Management recognized that a more disciplined approach to the collection and sharing of legal knowledge might benefit everyone — lawyers, staff, and business colleagues. The general counsel launched a project to identify legal precedents and make them more accessible, which included developing answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs). The project also tracked legal research that was repeatedly used to determine cost savings.

Following the successful project, the Law Group appointed a fulltime legal knowledge manager. The manager conducted an information audit that included interviews with over 100 members of the Law Group. The assessment identified pain points relating to the access and flow of knowledge. Three main focus areas resulted: 1. building knowledge; 2. connecting people, and 3. searching and streamlining. Following the assessment, we developed a succinct vision:

The KM team has taken steps through precedent collections, expertise locators, intranet communities of practice, internal and external educational services, RSS feeds, and collaborative technology. New initiatives are always underway, but the underlying KM concepts are nothing new. Sometimes the mix of substantive content, ground resources, technology, psychology, management support, communications, politics, promotion, and prayers don’t hit the mark, and we have to reassess and alter the work.

The more KM initiatives involve elements that are “baked in” to everyday work, the more likely they are to succeed. Some commentators have described this as being “in the flow.” We need knowledge processes in the daily flow and we need individuals in the KM flow to be accountable for knowledge within their area of expertise.

“Knowledge Anchors” are subject matter experts accountable for team knowledge

While we look to all our lawyers for their specific legal knowledge, getting beyond the silos of knowledge requires a discipline that will only come with assigned roles and accountabilities at the team level. As a KM expert opined:

“Knowledge management will not succeed if there are no workers and managers whose primary duties involve gathering and editing knowledge from those who have it, paving the work for the operation of knowledge networks, and setting up and managing knowledge technology infrastructures.”

Davenport, Thomas H. (1997). “Common pitfalls of knowledge management,” CIO Magazine, 1997.

We have recognized this need for knowledge accountability at the team level by creating a new role called “Knowledge Anchor,” which we are piloting among various legal practice teams. A knowledge anchor is a subject matter expert assigned to ensure the relevance and adoption of knowledge services at the team level and the promotion of a culture of knowledge best practices. The Knowledge Anchor’s overall responsibilities are to serve as:

• the main point of contact and accountability for identification and elevation of key team knowledge; and
• a liaison between their own team and the KM team on matters of knowledge service awareness and deployment.

You can improve process and project management. But, the legal knowledge we create is the fuel that keeps the whole engine running — it’s also the hardest to regulate. Our KM team has challenged the Knowledge Anchors to promote key team knowledge and to post it in relevant places (e.g., team folders in the document management system and in “Knowledge Hubs” established in our enterprise-wide collaborative tech platform called “RBC Connect”). There are no limits to the direction the Knowledge Anchors might take. The KM team recommends that they focus on developing team onboarding resources, promoting relevant legal and business education, and maintaining a regular spot on team meeting agendas.

Attaining knowledge accountability at the team level is no easy feat. The KM team is operating under no illusions. Many attempts along these lines have failed in law firms and law departments when busy lawyers succumb to their “day jobs” and, despite best intentions, allow key knowledge to grow stale and wither. It will be a challenge for the KM team to ride herd on a volunteer group, but there are reasons for optimism starting with a new collaborative technology platform.

Global connectivity and collaboration

In the past our efforts at sharing posted information within the department, and beyond to our business partners, were limited to a traditional website. We were using a static tool that had little traction with our business partners. With the recent introduction of Jive social media technology, we have an enterprise-wide collaborative technology platform called “RBC Connect.”

New social media tools, like RBC Connect, promise a much more interactive experience. In effect, we are harnessing social media features and applying them to our business. We created private communities that focused on particular legal practice areas that serve our businesses: banking, capital markets, wealth management, insurance, and investor and treasury services. In each case, several “Community Managers” were appointed to keep their sites active and posted with relevant information. Everyone is challenged to think of ways the new technology can be applied to open communities that will contribute to direct dialogues with our business colleagues.

“Where KM has added greatest value in organizations, it has been through the cultural realization that knowledge lives in communities, not in individuals.”

But how will we ensure that the communities are aligned with business objectives and focused on the right priorities? Formal networks harness the advantages of informal ones and give management more control over networking across the organization. The steps needed to formalize a network include giving it a “leader,” focusing interactions on specific topics, and building an infrastructure that stimulates the ongoing exchange of ideas. The KM team looks for opportunities to formalize networks around legal practice areas, legal projects, geographic hubs, or special purposes, such as regulatory oversight for some industries. Leadership of our virtual communities is a shared proposition between the subject matter experts who “own” specific knowledge and those who are tasked with keeping the sites vibrant and engaging. The potential for overlap and collaboration between the Knowledge Anchors and the Community Managers is obvious and something we encourage. Knowledge Anchors can be the inspiration and source of new legal research, precedents, or checklists and Community Managers can provide highly visible places to post that information. The reverse can also occur with Community Managers first becoming aware of important exchanges of knowledge (or requests for information) that our Knowledge Anchors can act upon.

Optimal knowledge behaviours

Early efforts at collecting precedents and managing documents did not achieve the desired results. Lawyers can devise the most intricate personal taxonomies and filing systems for their own unique precedents, but they don’t mix well with others. As a consequence, lawyers may be brilliant at retrieving their own content but then seek out other subject matter experts when confronted with the unknown.

Expertise directories can help to identify subject matter experts within an organization, and RBC Law Group is well represented in a “Find the Expert” tool that launched a few years ago, covering a variety of businesses and functions within the enterprise. But, the retrieval of existing personal and group information from stored resources is a more daunting challenge.

Finding knowledge in a timely and efficient manner is everyone’s KM nirvana. Barriers to knowledge, especially those induced by our own bad habits, are to be avoided at all cost. “It’s not what you know, and it’s not even who you know. It’s how much knowledge you give away. Hoarding knowledge diminishes your power because it diminishes your presence.” This is very good advice for lawyers to digest. Despite some negative observations about lawyers’ collaborative instincts, the truth is that most lawyers love to share work that is polished and in which they have confidence. Most of us are genuinely helpful when asked for information. But we have formed certain habits around the way we save — and stay in control — of our knowledge. We are challenged today to think outside the box and render our knowledge ever more useful and accessible to our immediate team, our business partners, and the organization as a whole. One writer sees hope in the behaviour now modeled by social media:

“With the popularity and proliferation of social media and social networking, we are seeing a change in the way people interact and behave. People are becoming more collaborative and willing to share. People are more forthcoming with information that, in a bygone era, was once considered better kept confidential. Helping others and sharing information is becoming the new default behavior. This new mindset, characterized by collaborating, cooperating, and sharing information and ideas, is the breeding ground on which knowledge management thrives and grows. This cultural shift, on a societal scale, is a factor that will predispose younger generations (some of whom are already law students and in the workforce) to embrace knowledge management.”

DiDomenco, Patrick. Knowledge Management for Lawyers. Chicago: American Bar Association, 2015, pp. 258-9. RBC Law Group is part of RBC General Counsel Group, which also includes the Corporate Secretariat, Subsidiary Governance Office, and Corporate Archive.

Knowledge professionals – a continuing need

The new technology and the skills of the upcoming generation of lawyers are reasons for optimism. However, none of this is a substitute for technical training and knowledge curation. Given current access to digital information, we expect our information needs to be instantly gratified. But knowing how to access efficiently what you need, when you need it — and how to teach this — is still very much the domain of information professionals.

Recently the KM team tackled the education challenge by introducing a series of Knowledge Primers which are now posted in a private site in RBC Connect that provides a communication channel for the entire global General Counsel Group. The primers range from instructions on RSS feeds for current awareness through naming conventions for the document management system and best practices for successful committee meetings. We expect to get particular benefit from the recently posted list of all electronic resources, subscriptions, and memberships — both internal and external — that are available to the members of our group.

As part of the KM team, RBC enjoys the services of a law library, and a corporate archive, serving the entire organization. The information professionals in these functions delight busy lawyers by producing elusive legal research and business records on demand. But our information professionals go further and now apply their skills in compiling knowledge in creative new ways to help end users find answers more quickly and efficiently. With that end in mind, the accompanying case study recounts our law library’s involvement in migrating legal content from a website environment to a new social media platform. Our library and archive are also assisting in the digitization of decades of paper legal memos and business records, tagging them with metadata and uploading them in more searchable environments.

The KM team works closely with our tech support team to succeed. Together KM and technology support people and process and identify technology gaps (more often gaps in individual training) that need to be addressed before the full technology potential is realized. Our knowledge professionals bridge the divide between technology features that our tech team understand intimately and the work realities experienced by our lawyers and staff when it is time to bring new technology into the daily flow.

KM and outside counsel

Due to the continued increase in the quality and technical systems of in house departments like RBC Connect, the role of outside counsel is rapidly changing. While corporate clients vary, both among and within themselves, the role of strategic advisor is now firmly moving into the hands of in house lawyers. Outside counsel provide specialized high intensity tasks that are inefficient for corporation to staff. From investigations to regulatory advice and transactions, outside counsel are more specialized than generalized advisors. In-house departments must constantly assess whether and when legal tasks are sufficiently required to more efficiently transfer them inside. KM systems and processes that integrate outside counsel’s assignments and expertise with in house teams leads to efficient interaction and timely decision making on projects and staffing. Other approaches that can better integrate outside counsel include:

• Secondments;
• Collaborative technologies, portals and extranets;
• Joint CLE panels and programs and training initiatives; and
• Insights into the nature of the business.

Knowledge management – onward and upward

Knowledge management strives for a permanent state of knowledge enhancement — a permanence outlasting fads that merely tinker at the edges and wither when project leaders leave. Behavioural change is required and that calls for open minds and collaborative spirits willing to apply different approaches to legal knowledge.

No one has a magic bullet — not the law firms, not the law departments, and not the KM consultants. It all boils down to how well the ground has been prepared in terms of culture and change management and how well the strategy is executed. It takes initiatives with true impact on end users, teamwork, learning from mistakes, senior support, resources, accountability, and that rarest of virtues — patience.