Over the years you will have probably heard plenty of 'war stories' from friends, colleagues and peers as to why law firm computerisation projects can fail.

The usual suspects include: the software was full of bugs, the IT supplier oversold an inadequate or inappropriate system, the firm's management failed to obtain the necessary buy-in from staff, there was insufficient training (both sides can be at fault here) and the project became bogged down in demarcation disputes between different contractors and different departments within a practice - this last item is often a problem with more ambitious IT projects.


Charles Christian: time to learn from mistakes with technology
Now, it is easy to point the finger of blame - indeed it is noticeable that a lot of law firms devote a disproportionate amount of time to the legal and contractual sides of IT procurement when it is arguable that they should be putting more of their resources into project management - but probably the most important message is that firms should learn from these experiences, rather than shift the blame onto someone else and then repeat exactly the same mistakes the next time they buy a new IT system.


If readers have been following some of the debate over the past four to five years about the importance of knowledge management in law firms, they will know one of the basic tenets is that know-how represents the collective intellectual capital of the firm.


And, because lawyers are only mortal, a firm needs to be able to capture permanently some of this know-how against the fateful day when a particular practitioner retires, moves on to another firm or gets run down by the Clapham omnibus.


In large firms, knowledge management is a multi-million pound activity, while in smaller firms it may be little more than a filing cabinet full of document precedents and templates.


But one thing everyone is agreed on is that know-how extends far beyond 'explicit' knowledge - the documents, the legal information and the stuff you can find in books - to include 'tacit' knowledge.


This more practically-oriented knowledge and experience - the stuff usually only found inside a lawyer's head - is all about applying this explicit information in real-life situations.


However, what law firms need to realise is that know-how applies to not only the practice of law but also the business of law - and in a modern firm that now includes such things as the management of IT projects.


Firms therefore need to start learning from their experiences with technology so that last year's mistakes are a lesson to be learned from rather than a model to be repeated in the future.


Charles Christian is an independent adviser to the Law Society's Software Solutions guide