Targeted effect: How to secure partner engagement with KM

Lack of engagement with KM is a known problem in law firms, but what’s the answer?

If you bring together a group of legal KM professionals, a common refrain is how hard it is to get partners and fee-earners across their law firm or department to prioritise involvement in knowledge ?creation and sharing.

It’s not that lawyers don’t get it – it’s just that they don’t do it. Yes, there might be pockets of good practice at the partner, associate and trainee level, but the overall picture is patchy. If only, the chorus goes, we could get everyone playing their part, the efficiency and quality of our client service would be dramatically improved.

So, how can a managing partner, ?GC or KM head drive partner and fee-earner engagement with KM? Is it ?just a matter of making time for lawyers ?to get involved or are their deeper strategic, cultural or operational concerns that need to be addressed?

With Mark Gould of Addleshaw Goddard and Andrew Woolfson of Reynolds Porter Chamberlain, I posed these questions earlier this year at Managing Partner’s KM Legal 2010 conference. We received a clear and consistent response from the assembled international group of partners and KM professionals: a strong knowledge-sharing culture driven from the top of the firm or department is the key to unlocking ?KM potential.

But, just being told that you need to improve or change your firm or department’s culture is not much practical help. With the conference group, we evaluated and ranked the individual factors that influence the level of partner and fee-earner engagement in KM. I have set out below our findings and suggested how they might guide you to focus your efforts.

Factors influencing engagement

To focus our evaluation, we drew up a list of 11 factors that positively influence partner and fee-earner engagement with KM. We then asked the conference group to rank the factors by degree of importance, based on their own experiences. The list of factors, ?their score and resulting ranking is ?shown in Figure 1.

All surveys like this have their limitations. Some of the participants in ?our survey said they struggled to make ?a clear distinction between all of the options and to give a simple numeric response. Some of the participants also said we had missed a few factors. The additional factors they suggested are shown in Figure 2.

But, the degree of consistency in ?the results and the feedback we received reassured us that we were on the right track and that the survey results were worth taking into account.

The survey results (with grateful ?thanks to Mark Gould for his overnight number crunching at the conference) revealed the following findings at the ?top and bottom of the list:?

• the three highest ranking factors were similar in focus as well as score – they all relate to the firm or legal department having a strong and embedded ?KM culture;?

• the next two highest ranking factors also focus on the firm or department’s overall approach to KM; and?

• four out of the five lowest-ranking factors were not ranked as the highest factor by anyone and so sit clearly at the bottom of the list.

Where to focus your efforts

Let’s focus on the number one ranking factor influencing engagement with KM in a bit more detail: partners, lawyers and staff understanding what KM means and what it does for the firm and for them ?as individuals.

What this means is that everyone in the law firm or department needs to be clear about KM’s purpose, relevance and importance in driving the success of the business and their own career.

Reflecting upon the centrality of effective knowledge creation and sharing to the success of any professional services business, you might think this degree of focus and understanding should be taken as a given.

However, in my experience of collaborating with different law firms and legal departments, this is often at the heart of the problem: effective KM is assumed and, as a result, it does receive sufficiently distinct focus when the leaders of the firm, department or team are setting and articulating group or individual goals.

The focus on individual goals – ensuring relevance and motivation at the individual level – is very important. This is because the secret of effective legal KM is mass participation.

KM must not be seen by fee-earners as the preserve of the KM department, PSLs or IT. Nor must it be seen by ?fee-earners as something that’s done ?by others for them and for clients to ?consume. Rather, all lawyers should ?see effective knowledge creation and sharing as their own core personal responsibility and as a key aspect of ?their career development.

But mass participation does not mean a single model for all. The focus and involvement needs to be personalised to the individual fee-earner’s level and role. And the motivation needs to be personalised too.

A partner’s answers to the questions ‘what does KM mean for me?’ and ‘why should I focus on KM in preference to other priorities?’ will be very different to those of a junior lawyer. Similarly, an answer from a lawyer in an established practice will differ to that from a partner leading a firm or department’s focus in ?a new sector or market.

And it’s not just the lawyers. ?Different support functions like HR and ?BD need to understand their particular ?role in delivering the firm or department’s KM objectives.

Law firms and departments also need to address the terminology problem in ensuring everyone knows what KM means. It’s clear that the terms ‘KM’, ‘PSL’, ‘know-how’ and ‘knowledge’ don’t resonate across all of their target audiences.

We have seen in the UK professional services sector various attempts at rebranding both KM functions and roles. It seems that there is value in adopting terminology that conveys the firm or department’s particular focus: for example, knowledge and innovation, knowledge sharing and collaboration, or legal ?process improvement.

A number of the factors ranked further down the list will often follow a focus on this first factor. For example, you need effective reporting and recording processes to ensure the measurement and recognition of individual partner and fee-earner contributions. And, it’s important to have clear roles and responsibilities for the different KM activities that partners and fee-earners undertake either alone or in collaboration with PSLs or other knowledge staff.

But, introducing these operational processes won’t have a meaningful impact unless the law firm or department also has in place a broader focus and understanding of KM’s purpose.

The role of partners

Items two and four in the survey rankings highlight the importance of partners leading by example and therefore promoting and prioritising KM involvement in their teams.

You cannot deliver the necessary degree of understanding and engagement in KM across a law firm or department simply by telling people at induction and other training sessions that effective KM is important. Young lawyers need to hear their seniors talking the talk and see them walking the walk.

Partners who use and promote the role of KM in winning new clients and deepening existing client relationships or who prioritise internal knowledge-sharing within their teams have significant influence in the way their junior colleagues engage with KM.

We all know that, as George Orwell might have put it, some partners are ?more equal than others when it comes ?to their degree of influence, and that’s ?why central management commitment heads other partner involvement in ?the ranking.

Any legal KM head who has a senior or managing partner or GC with a personal passion for effective KM will tell you just how fortunate they are. The added value influence of a supportive senior or managing partner or GC will not just be reflected in the formal positioning of KM in their strategy for the law firm or department. It will also manifest itself in ?the way they talk about KM when addressing clients, staff and the media on a range of topics.

The impact of this is that the role ?of effective KM is taken as a given, ?but this time in a very positive way – it’s ?seen as being at the heart of the law ?firm or department’s institutional personality or DNA.

The strategic focus for KM

Items three and five in the survey rankings reflect the view that the effective positioning of KM as part of the firm or department’s broader business strategy is more important than having a separate knowledge strategy. It’s also a view that ?I always give when guiding clients and other businesses who are starting out ?on their KM journey.

A short and clearly documented knowledge strategy is a very helpful ?tool in defining scope and articulating priorities. But it needs to be properly subsidiary to the firm or department’s broader business strategy and ready to adapt its focus or change tack when that broader strategy does.

Using the findings

This brief survey and its results should provide a useful focus for a benchmarking health check of your law firm or department’s KM culture, and help to surface some underlying factors influencing the success or failure of individual KM projects or systems.

Ruth Ward is the head of central KM at international law firm Allen & Overy ?(ruth.ward@allenovery.com)