The Knowledge Factory: Time Presses
Welcome to the Knowledge Factory.
The law is a knowledge factory in tangled production around relationships, rules and time. And time presses. With deadlines, appearances, contract expirations and work products that live in mandatory and restricted frames of immediacy, the legal field most often moves under the weight of the evils of the day. This makes change and looking to the future difficult. Very difficult.
But this space will be a thought exercise in what happens when the weight of the present is lifted, if only temporarily, to think about the future of the law, legal technology and digital transformation. Based on how I think and work with others, there will also be asides on philosophy, psychoanalysis, history and the mountains. And it will always be an unfinished conversation. Because that’s what the future of legal is — a perpetually unfinished conversation.
Transformation is Communication
If digital transformations in law firms and legal departments are like endless conversations, communication should be the line of production where changes start. Attacking inefficiencies, gaps and fails in exchanges of information is difficult. And it’s often a place where focus is wrongly placed on individuals, personalities and styles. When reviewing communication within your legal factory, start with processes and procedure — not people.
A Knowledge Inventory
Your legal organization can’t expect timely and impactful communication without awareness and training about where information lives and ought to be shared. Before training yourself and others, start with a knowledge inventory. This will likely not be fun. Knowledge inventories tend to be like confessionals… telling strangers about secrets, where the bodies are buried, the scrawled notes, etc. But if you don’t know where things are/belong, they can’t effectively be shared.
Embrace/Train the Chaos
Things get complicated fast. Firms and legal organizations can replace filing cabinets with all kinds of platforms and applications for storing, producing and sharing knowledge:
- Case/Matter Management Platforms.
- Document/Content, Discovery, and Contract Management Systems.
- Dedicated Email, Chat, Texting, and Notes Applications.
- Intranets, Knowledge Bases, and Learning Management Systems.
The desire to control expanding flows of information makes sense. But in a knowledge factory, excess and overflows should be expected. What is more important than control, rules that are bound to fail, or the styles/personalities of your colleagues is giving yourself and others actionable guides for how to work with information.
As an example, when adopting a new document/content management platform, legal teams often spend an exhausting amount of time creating a folder/tag/permission structure that can account for their present practices, teams and all potentialities. But reality and other people always prove more complicated and diversified than any hierarchy or system of ordering. If the center can’t hold, things don’t necessarily fall apart — but they certainly fall out of folders.
As changes within your firm or legal department accelerate, the distribution of knowledge takes center stage. Communication and training make real transformation possible.
Welcome to the knowledge factory.
