Bottling your know-how

Increased competition and evolving technology has spurred change among many law firms which want to stay one step ahead, says Loyita Worley

Law firms are seeing many dynamic changes which can be traced to two catalysts.

The first is the increase in competition between law firms, and the second is the development of information technology to the point at which it provides services which until recently were unthinkable.Competition between firms has always existed, but I sense a difference now.

It may be the threat of another recession looming but there is more emphasis than ever on retaining clients by the quality of service provided.

Having attracted clients, firms are working hard to keep them on board and IT is the platform that links the two.

Knowledge management is the latest tool in the battle for supremacy and focuses on legal information provision.The motivation behind knowledge management is, as ever, profit.

The increase in competition has changed the image of the profession and is driving solicitors' firms to be run along corporate lines, that is to say, run more efficiently, with more leverage per fee earner.

All firms are competing for new clients, to retain clients and generally for a larger market share.Knowledge management is the attempt to capture the legal expertise of the firm's capital asset - its lawyers - and to make it available to others.

This is normally done by extracting knowledge in the form of know-how (such as letters and memos used internally and externally in transactions, standard forms and guidance notes on particular areas of law) from individual solicitors and building it into a database that is easy to search.

Of course, it is impossible to capture the expertise itself, but at least the essence will have been distilled into the documents produced by those with experience.The benefits are numerous.

Time spent on research will be cut, providing quicker service to clients, and there will be more time for other fee-earning work and fewer hours worked to provide the same level of service.

Years of experience can be retained within the firm, and no longer walks out of the door with departing lawyers.

A certain level of quality is maintained, as all the lawyers will be delivering their services from a common starting point and high standard, which will ensure consistently good quality legal advice to clients.

Conversely, there is less risk of delivering poor advice and therefore laying the firm open to negligence claims.In Richards Butler's case, the new know-how database 'ouRBase', is accessed via the firm's Intranet and is available to staff at any time and from anywhere in the world.

The system offers additional benefits such as hypertext links to cases and legislation, so that fee earners can research from their PCs, and automatic updating of these links as and when changes to legislation or case law take place.

It also links to other related material on similar subjects and by the use of a legal thesaurus, can retrieve relevant documents, even when the precise word being searched for doesn't appear in the text of the document itself.

It also contains court forms and precedents which can be completed on screen and saved.But knowledge management is not cheap - in terms of effort or finance - and full commitment is imperative for success.Ultimately, a database containing know-how can never be a substitute for the lawyer in person because intellectual effort is still required to interface with clients and to interpret and apply the law.

It can only ever provide a starting point.However, the application of knowledge management can offer a gateway to new services whereby the most administrative and repetitive functions of legal practice could be offered directly to the client via an extranet.

This would have a significant impact on the way in which law firms are run and may in the long term alter the function and services of lawyers.Loyita Worley is head of library & information services at City firm Richards Butler