Canadian Lawyer

18 O c t O b e r 2 0 1 4 w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m by Danielle oloFSSon tECh sUpport Managing knowledge in a polycentric market i recently noticed an increase in blog postings discussing the death of knowledge management. A Google search of the terms "knowledge management" and "death," however, soon revealed no cause for alarm as knowledge management seems to have died regularly over the past 20 years. There is nothing new with pronounc- ing a subject, for which we have nothing more to say, dead or at an end. Richard Heinberg did it with growth in his book The End of Growth. Francis Fukuyama raised the question of history's death in his controversial 1989 article "The End of History." A tad more subtle, the novelist, Amin Maalouf, places history on life support in his latest novel, Les désorientés. Instead of performing speculative autopsies on knowledge management, a field which, by definition, can only be thriving in a world that is ever more dependent on information, the question should be rather, is the way we practise knowledge management still relevant to our respective businesses, markets, and clients? In an August blog post, Ian Fry iden- tifies three types of knowledge manage- ment: knowledge of process, knowledge of product, and knowledge of customer. According to Fry, law firms typically practise knowledge of product. Fry's categories of knowledge are helpful in identifying where in a national, not to mention global, firm knowledge man- agement can run into problems of rel- evance. While our knowledge of product and best practices may be exceptional, our understanding of the customer that ultimately requires the product is often imperfect. For example, while practising M&A in Stockholm, I worked on the sale of a family-owned Swedish company to an American multinational. At that time, a typical Swedish share purchase agree- ment was 20 pages. Understandably, when presented with the purchaser's 120-page model share purchase agree- ment, the vendor balked. The subse- quent negotiations, which had been scheduled to last three days, lasted three weeks resulting in a substantial increase in the purchaser's legal spend. In this instance, the purchaser's model docu- ment while a comprehensive reflection of best practices in the United States, was clearly unsuitable for the market in which it was being used. The above is by no means an excep- tional story. In speaking to colleagues in national and global firms around the world, a common concern is the prod- ucts developed in London, New York, or Toronto are not always suitable to local markets and as a consequence remain unused by lawyers in these jurisdictions. Innovation in global firms means viewing local markets as something more than potential outsourcees.

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