Maximizing organizational knowledge at Linklaters

Having a knowledge management program and letting it tick over for the sake of it is, in many cases, a waste of time and resources. But, in the right circumstances and with a strategy in place, a KM program can be hugely beneficial. At Linklaters, our knowledge efforts focus on outcomes and behaviors, rather than just “having a KM program.” This article explains how, over the last 18 months, we’ve undertaken a significant global consultation processes and delivered a series of knowledge related initiatives to improve access and use of knowledge content aligned with the business. We’ll look at where we started, how we avoided certain barriers – both common and unique – some examples of success, where we see the next step for KM in the firm and some tips we feel could potentially be applied across many different types of organizations.

Understanding business operations
Linklaters’ core business is organized around three streams: Corporate, Finance & Projects and Commercial. We have a long history of investing in the creation, capture and dissemination of knowledge, with a significant team of dedicated legal and non-legal resources around the world. We have over 2,000 lawyers in 30 offices in 23 countries, who are supported by 125 professional support lawyers, know-how, library and information staff around the world. This is a significant investment in knowledge generation, distribution, sourcing, facilitation and packaging. As a result of that investment, we have thousands of pages of high-quality manuals, transaction outlines, precedents, intranet sites, videos, online learning, databases and knowledge documents, in addition to the daily creation of new knowledge.

In 2005, we had reached a point where that wealth of knowledge across disparate practices, offices, countries and cultures meant that finding the right information that would make a difference in a client context, was becoming a barrier to achieving the greatest impact. It was time to consider what changes might help derive greater value and sharing of this great and dynamic resource.

A garden of knowledge
In approaching this question, we reflected on the growth of plants and the roles and impacts of gardeners. Plants, like knowledge, grow without the intervention of the gardener or the knowledge manager. The gardener can till the soil, fertilize the plants, remove the weeds and water lovingly. The difference the gardener makes is the increased yield or quality as a result of that intervention and that investment of time and effort. As the knowledge team at a professional services firm, our task is to create and manage the conditions in the organization’s garden in which knowledge can be created and developed naturally. The aim is to increase the yield and catalyze valuable growth – but not to control all aspects of the process of plants growing. It’s vital to remember at this stage, that the approach to tending a garden would differ from London to Sydney and there’s no “one-sizefits- all solution” to tending the growth of knowledge.

The key driver for a law firm is to help clients with quality advice and innovative solutions in an appropriate business model. KM is therefore not measured by the metrics of how many documents, precedents and systems there are, but by the impact on the “knowledge garden.” More specifically, the impact those investments make to the speed and quality of work that is delivered to clients and to the quality and focus of new knowledge and thought leadership created. Determining the business approach In undertaking this work, there were three lessons that shaped our approach:

1. Start with the business needs.
2. Respect the local villages first, and ensure a global village is also created.
3. Deliver valuable quick wins as part of a roadmap.

1. Start with the business needs
Any program to improve a business must commence with a detailed understanding of the business and its needs. For example, in a law firm there’s no point in delivering a comprehensive article database to a practice when the main issue that can make a real difference to the business is client metrics. Step one, therefore, was to do our homework before starting anything. In our program, we reviewed CVs of partners, revenue figures, marketing materials and any other business briefing papers that were available to get as full a picture as possible of the people in the practice. This was to ensure that when we did start engaging with people around how knowledge could make a difference to their business and the work they did, we’d have a clear understanding of who they were and what their drivers were. This meant that from the very beginning we’d be talking about things that really mattered to them. Indeed, the result of this exercise means you should have a more complete mental model of their business than they do.

To help us with this task, we undertook a global survey in May 2005, which generated 100 pages of ideas from 165 respondents across all practices and offices. We then visited lawyers and clients to get their views on what had been generated and increase our understanding of what the practices expected from us. This consultation process was vital in determining what initiatives would be delivered to ensure they aligned with business impact. Engaging face-to-face with the key stakeholder partners garners support for improvements to systems and for changes to working practices. There’s no substitute for hearing from people on the ground, in their markets and so an extensive travel and consultation program occurred over six months (see sidebox, below).

Using stories to deliver results
The focus of all elements of your consultation process should be on value, not on “what could we do to better manage our knowledge.” Seek to identify high value low volume projects that can deliver maximum benefit. Stories are an incredibly powerful tool for doing this effectively. Each of our meetings elicited something which could be shared with other groups and offices, often morphing and improving as a concept from group to group. It was much easier to start meaningful dialogue by opening with a story. Lawyers are very good at reasoning from analogy and stories from other groups provide mental breathing space. We were heavily influenced in our approach by Stephen Denning’s work on storytelling. Starting with stories, and then hearing the similar and different issues in each practice, enabled us to get a much better understanding of the actual needs of the practices.

2. Respect villages but support holistic navigation
With so many practices and offices, each group’s own material is often their primary value (often on a global basis), but there’s also significant value in traversing the entire firm’s knowledge. In order to make such traversal a simple and intuitive process, there needs to be a common system and approach, delivered in a framework where the village feel is preserved and is the visual centrepiece. For Linklaters this meant the design and release of a new intranet and four key tools or portals. Importantly, the functionality, usability and design of each is shaped by the strategic need it serves, rather than one overarching portal, where everything from HR policies to the latest
legal knowledge is stored in the same navigational structure and hierarchies. Our four distinct tools are:

1. know-how Online.
2. Client Strategy Online.
3. Workspace.
4. MySite.

Developing the knowledge portals
Each of these four elements (see sidebox, right, for a full description of each) are continuously evolving with local ownership and engagement and wide management engagement and support. Where appropriate, information is reused and shared. In this way, it’s possible to respect the distinct knowledge cultures and needs or “villages” which exist around the firm in the context of the broader whole to form one cohesive firm delivering to clients. Each practice group and country is responsible for determining the content of, and maintaining, their elements of Linklaters knowledge. By providing local control within an overall framework, we maximized the feeling of ownership at the practice level, guaranteeing usage and buy in from each village or community.

This is important because the further removed people feel from control of their group knowledge, the less they care and contribute. An impersonal global system with lowest common dominator standards for content can achieve consistency, but often achieves neither contribution nor use. The impact of this was felt especially in the design, which had to respect that one size would not fit all, while being a global template reflective of our “one-firm” culture and which supported easy traversal among communities. In practice, this became a series of standard categories on each portal that then housed material contributed and owned locally. The practice selection (the village) was a dominant visual metaphor.

The difference between local and global
Communication at this point moved from central, global information to local communications that highlighted the local resources which were now more easily available. The building of the portals and training of the user groups by local KM teams was positioned by as how to use the community’s knowledge (“our knowledge”) rather than standardized training on a global initiative (“the system”). This enhanced the buy in from our user groups, ensuring use of the new tools and practical value.

Relationships and trust are key to developing and sharing knowledge with local ownership and engagement and building these relationships and trust cannot happen unless you respect the villages, but respecting the villages means that knowledge becomes messy. From a central initiative perspective, messy is uncomfortable, but the reality is that knowledge is messy.

Deliver valuable quick wins as part of a roadmap
One final point that’s important to make is on the issue of gaining quick wins. The easiest way to get everyone in an organization to support what you are trying to achieve is to deliver some quick wins. Our goal was to achieve quick wins before the consultation process as a benchmark for credibility. We did this in two ways:

1. By liberating the most important knowledge already acquired in the first three months to deliver visible, practical impact.
2. By presenting the whole plan upfront and providing delivery dates.

The quick wins had to be positioned as a liberation approach to knowledge, rather than a completed architecture that would remain for the next ten years. This enabled us to generate the mental agreement for quick change and address a common predisposition in lawyers to get everything perfect before starting.

For Linklaters, carrying out the first task above meant harnessing the wealth of existing materials and delivering them in a holistic, navigable portal, (knowhow Online), which resonated with the language and approach of lawyers.

From inception to delivery, the whole process took three months to deliver the quick win, implemented on a global basis connecting lawyers with the most valuable content which ranged from documents to internal expertise databases. The consultation process then proceeded with a success story, so those engaged already understood the value of what had been delivered and were much more confident about asking for more. We found that an educated client is a more demanding client.

It’s equally important to lay down a view of the elements of the whole plan. Just as new freeways and bypasses are drawn in road maps many years before they are actually constructed, it’s critical, in the early stages of a knowledge initiative, to lay down the markers for where the important things will be and then fill them out – being honest about what will be delivered when. Assembling subject matter experts and technology in the right direction is not always easy and issues arising must be managed, however delivery as promised generates credibility that makes subsequent engagement and initiatives easier.

The quick wins must make a business difference. In our case, a low-value adding quick win would reflect poorly on the strategic focus of the knowledge initiative. Each of the elements on the roadmap clearly need to have a direct benefit to the business of the firm and the particular community. However, if you have consulted widely, are respectful of the villages and have listened well, it should prove difficult to draw up a map that takes you in the wrong direction.

What’s next for KM at Linklaters?
Having finished our consultations, designed a strategy that respects our communities and the one firm culture and is advanced on implementation, we’re about to move into the next, threedimensional phase. The first dimension relates to content creation and leverage. The increased transparency now provided to the wealth of knowledge at the firm has borne an increased desire to share common knowledge and documents among groups, reducing duplication.

This initiative is community led, not central initiative led. It has also encouraged sharing of best practice such that content development and packaging projects have become the focus in many practices.

Again, this is community led, not central initiative led. The second dimension relates to marketing and leveraging our experience in global matters. We’re currently finalizing the next generation of tracking for global matters and expertise by linking SAP, Documentum, electronic transaction bibles and marketing case studies via a cross functional knowledge initiative with involvement from the practice as well as the marketing, finance, know-how and IT departments around the world.

The final element of our focus for the next 12 months relates to helping clients with knowledge management. Specifically this involves increasingly sharing our methodologies and approaches with clients as a way of supporting major client relationships. Many of our major clients have significant internal counsel functions on a multigeography basis, and are themselves large international law firms that happen to be within financial institutions and major organizations.

We are increasingly being asked to assist clients think through their internal knowledge management programs, and share our knowledge about knowledge. There are sure to be interesting times ahead.