Canadian Lawyer

teCh sUpport By daNielle oloffSoN Wikinomics and the metrics of knowledge management a mong the various knowledge management conferences and seminars I attended in the last year, two in particular exemplify some of the divergent preoccupations of the field. The first was a session presented during the International Law and Technology Association conference by John Alber, strategic technology partner at Bryan Cave LLP. In his paper "Five Reasons Why Terms Like 'Practice Support', 'Knowledge Management' and 'Financial Services' Miss the Point," Alber noted few people in a law firm really know what these terms mean and suggested they imply a desire on the part of their respective departments to be left to operate in a void with little connection to the business of the firm. He reminded the audience while this strategy may not be questioned when times are good, it renders these departments vulnerable to cutbacks when times are hard. An almost direct antithesis to Alber's talk was the 2012 Toronto/New York Knowledge Management Summit held in November at Goodmans LLP in Toronto. The entire morning was devoted to exploring technology design that would enable lawyers to manage and share information more effectively. After a particularly riveting presentation by Mark Leung, associate director at Rotman DesignWorks, I asked how return on investment of these new designs is measured. No sooner had I posed the question than I realized how boorish I must have sounded. This was a morning devoted to dreaming and innovation — not bean counting! The often-conflicting drives to 16 F e b r uary 2013 www.CANADIAN innovate and justify such innovations economically is by no means exclusive to knowledge management. They haunt most research-and-development departments. Although it may depend on the market — Toronto and New York may be markets in which the inherent value of knowledge management does not require justification — sitting where I do in Montreal, I still feel obliged to justify the value KM adds to a firm. Am I really enabling our lawyers to deliver an ever-better product to our clients? If so, can I prove it? Have I approached the explanation of "why knowledge management?" as though it were a given, failing to realize that my immediate clients, the lawyers, may not have had the time or interest to read the books I have on its inherent benefits? Moreover, how do I counter the argument that law firms, in some L a w ye r m a g . c o m form or other, have always practised KM — working with precedents and recycling memos and other forms of knowledge is not new— and therefore why do we need a KM department? At the risk of reiterating my boorishness, I believe knowledge management needs to prove tangibly the value it adds to a firm. One way of doing this is to position ourselves somewhere in the vicinity of business development. Returning to the industry analogy, it is not unusual for research-and-development engineers to visit clients to examine how a product is working and to receive feedback that will help improve the product. In the context of a law firm, this visit might take the form of a client satisfaction meeting that would enable us to determine, first hand, what our firm's clients expect and to develop our products in response to this. At the

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