A. What Is Knowledge Management?

• Author: Ted Tjaden
• Profession: National Director of Knowledge Management McMillan LLP
• Pages: 300-304

Page 300

This chapter discusses knowledge management and its importance to the practice of law along with its close relationship with legal research and writing. As a discipline, knowledge management is generally not discussed or taught in 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 advances in the practice of law over the last twenty years have both caused and supported the ascendancy of knowledge management in law firms, the reality is that lawyers have always practised 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 better 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 research memos being the two most obvious examples. In addition, although knowledge management in the legal industry is often associated with large law firms, even small firms and sole practitioners will benefit from adopting personal knowledge management principles to become more effective in their work.

Page 301

There are many definitions of knowledge management.¹One reason for so many definitions is that knowledge management spans a number of disciplines (ranging from business management, to information 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) comprises a range of practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable adoption of insights and experiences. Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in organizational processes or practice.²From this definition we can observe a few key elements of the definition of knowledge management:

· Describing knowledge management as a "range of practices" reflects the broad nature of knowledge management and the fact that it can encompass a wide variety of activities related to information practices.

· A definition of "knowledge" as "insights and experiences" recognizes 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 processes or practice, often found in documents or other "explicit" content).

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