Knowledge Management for Lawyers

• Author: Ted Tjaden
• Profession: National Director of Knowledge Management McMillan LLP
• Pages: 300-320

300

CHAP TER 10

KNOWLEDGE

MANAGEMENT

FOR LAWYERS

This chapter discuss es knowledge management and its importance to

the practice of law along with its close relationship with legal research

and writing. As a d iscipline, knowledge management is generally not

discussed or t aught i n law school; instead, it is often only when the law

student is in practice that the importance of knowledge management

can be appreciated and put into use. And although technological advan-

ces in the practice of law over the la st twenty years have both caused

and supported the ascenda ncy of knowledge management in law f‌irms,

the reality is t hat lawyers have always pract ised forms of knowledge

management, from the moment hundreds of years ago (or longer) that

a lawyer f‌irst set aside a good sample agreement or f‌igured out a bet-

ter way of doing things. As will be seen in this chapter, knowledge

management intersects with legal research and writing in a number of

ways, with precedents and rese arch memos being the two most obvious

examples. In addition, although knowledge management in the legal

industry is often associated with la rge law f‌irms, even small f‌irms and

sole practitioners wil l benef‌it from adopting personal k nowledge man-

agement principles to become more effective in their work.

Knowledge Manageme nt for Lawyers 301

A. WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT?

There are many def‌initions of knowledge management.1 One reason

for so many def‌initions is that knowledge management spans a num-

ber of disciplines (ranging from busi ness management, to inform ation

science, to computer technology) and any number of industries and

business. For our purpose, a basic def‌inition is suff‌icient to introduce

the topic:

Knowledge management (KM) compri ses a range of practices used in

an organization to identif y, create, represent, distribute and enable

adoption of insights and e xperiences. Such in sights and exp eriences

comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in

organizationa l processes or practice.2

From this def‌inition we can obser ve a few key elements of the def‌in-

ition of knowledge m anagement:

Describing knowledge man agement as a “range of practices” ref‌lects UÊ

the broad nature of knowledge management and the fact th at it can en-

compass a wide variety of act ivities related to information practices.

A def‌inition of “knowledge” as “insights and experiences” recog-UÊ

nizes the two broad categories of knowledge: “tacit knowledge”

(being the insights and experiences embodied in individuals) and

“explicit knowledge” (being the insights and experiences embedded

in organizational proce sses or practice, often found in documents or

other “explicit” content).

Knowledge man agement is not neces sarily all about technology (the UÊ

def‌inition does not expre ssly mention technology). Although tech-

nology plays an important role in knowledge management “to iden-

tify, create, represent, distr ibute and en able adoption of insights and

experiences,” there is an importa nt human element to this process.

Even though knowledge management has been practised i n one

form or another for hundreds of years,3 modern l aw-related knowledge

management makes it s f‌irst major appearance in t he Canadian legal

1 See, for example, the v arious def‌initions li sted by Raymond Sims, “43 Knowledge

Management Def‌initions— and Counting,” Sims Learning Connections Blog, com-

ment posted 16 March 20 08, http://blog.simslear ningconnections.com /?p=279.

2 Wikipedi a contributors, “Knowledge Manageme nt,” Wikip edia, The Free En-

cyclopedia, online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management.

3 An early KM tech nology was Agostino Ramel li’a bookwheel, invented over 400

years ago (in 1588). See the wonderfu l graphic of it in Figure 10.1, sourced from

the Wikiped ia entry for “Bookwheel.”