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w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m A p r I L 2 0 1 5 19 building before opening another. Based largely on the car park, they create 150 spots and as soon as they see cars parking on the grass, they know it's time to open another office. Using this magical limit, Gore & Associates doesn't need the "usual layers of middle and upper management — because in groups that small, informal personal relationships are more effective," wrote Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point. So as firms get bigger, formalized processes start appearing. Departments spring up to take responsibility for things rather than relying on the ad hoc and informal. Silos appear. Policies are drafted. Suddenly all the people you can say you know has hit a limit and you can't keep it all in your head. Instead of know- ing who has the expertise you have to use a system to find that knowledge and expertise. Then, before you know it, someone starts talking about the need for an intranet. You know you've crossed that 150-max line when someone starts talking about SharePoint. But it's true — suddenly you need centralized stor- age solutions and a team to help co-ordinate the sharing of best practices across the groups of people that you no longer know. Large law firm KM does well at scaling up the personal or small firm KM for externalizing knowledge. We now have access to constantly evolving technology that helps us solve these infor- mation management problems caused by our brains' inability to retain the full institutional wisdom of the firm in our heads. But that's only half the problem. If externalizing knowledge was all that KM was about my work here on earth would be done. But there's another key tenet to any knowledge manage- ment strategy in law firms: widespread adoption and usage of those centralized repositories of wisdom. I have been involved in user experience and design at law firms for most of my career and I can now say, pretty definitively, that not only has the "build it and they shall come" saying never been true, but that even if you build it to be useful, usable, and engag- ing, they still won't come. (Though if it is useful, usable, and engaging, people do tend to stay longer once they've arrived.) So I am coming to the conclusion that perhaps this usage and adoption side of the problem comes down to that most funda- mental of human characteristics: trust. The knowledge sharing literature states in no uncertain terms that it requires a culture of trust — both from a willingness to use other people's documents and expertise, and a willingness to share your own documents and insights, according to Dr. Max Evans at McGill University. And so that Dunbar number pops up again. With greater social interactivity in groups of 150 or smaller, some social networking sites are beginning to adopt this thinking. Path, for example, is a popular social network that allows people to message friends, and share photos. But this site is different because they have adopted the Dunbar number theory and limit their users to 150 friends. There is growing empirical data that "many startups find that after 150 people the company becomes more rigid and loses the initial spirit." Dave Morin of Path says: "Fundamen- tally, once you go beyond this number of people you can keep in your head, you begin to filter yourself, you change what you share and how much. . . ." In our larger organizations and practice groups, do we filter or stop contributing our know-how to communities of practice if we're not sure of the full audience anymore? Do we stop sharing when the personal relationships between colleagues are stretched too thin? How do Facebook, Path, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn build in enough trust to keep us engaged? How and why do we continue to post and share freely on these sites? What might KM learn from further developments in evolutionary psychology and how our brains are wired to create greater engagement and adoption of our internal knowledge systems? KM at larger firms attempts to replicate and scale the social interactions that happen in smaller groups and firms. KM helps lawyers cross the trust and social boundaries between groups of 150 to find the knowledge and expertise they need — whether through expertise location, regular group meetings, or central- ized knowledge collections. We have worked out how to store and (possibly less successfully) retrieve large volumes of knowl- edge. But it isn't clear that our processes and systems make up for the lack of trust that creeps in when our firms tip over the 150 mark. This is where KM's next challenge lies — how to foster trust so that we can truly scale knowledge sharing in our larger organizations. Kate Simpson is national director of knowledge management at Bennett Jones LLP, and is responsible for developing the firm's KM strategy and initiatives. The opinions expressed in this article are her own. CONNECT WITH IN-HOUSE COUNSEL COLLEAGUES AT LEXPERT.CA/CCCA Check out in-house counsel's best networking tool! The 2014/15 Lexpert CCCA/ACCJE Directory & Yearbook online edition is a user-friendly, outstanding key resource for all in-house counsel. Access more than 4,000 listees, more than RUJDQL]DWLRQV´QGIUHVKHGLWRULDOFRQWHQW and information on deals and links to important resources. ANYWHERE. ANYTIME. ON ANY DEVICE. ntitled-5 1 2015-02-09 10:18 AM

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