Partner Tilly Gray was recently interviewed for law.com’s piece on “Nontraditional Knowledge Management: Custom-Fitting KM to Your Firm’s Unique Needs.”
Writes Abhijat Saraswat of Litera Microsystems: “[A]ny firm can use to reap the benefits of capturing, organizing and sharing the knowledge that its attorneys and other employees create. Traditionally, law firms used KM specifically to expedite lawyers’ work by maintaining a repository of legal documents for future reference. But KM can be defined and used much more broadly than that.”
One example of a nontraditional approach to KM comes from Tilly: “[Cassels Brock] started by trying to implement traditional KM, with embedded researchers and knowledge managers in different departments and have evolved our approach over time.” Now, she says, she works on “KM-adjacent” tasks, from “creating process improvements across the entire firm and eliminating waste to effectuating change and driving innovation.”
Tilly goes on to provide three key steps any firm can use to improve its use of internal knowledge:
1. Rethink knowledge in the information age
2. Focus on your firm’s culture in designing an approach to KM
3. Don’t limit KM documents and legal knowledge
In Tilly’s view, any firm that values its intellectual capital can benefit from clearly delineating responsibility for the maintenance of that asset through some form of KM. “Knowledge and expertise capture is process improvement,” she says. “You can’t have one without the other—and it’s all knowledge management.”
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