9 - Knowledge Management

Summary

Lawyer roles in knowledge work are a matter of individual efforts to accumulate and apply personal knowledge to client opportunities and threats. The individual lawyer as a knowledge worker has in their head a store of information combined with interpretation, reflection, and context that represent a resource enabling the lawyer to help clients in their defense against accusations and allegations, their exploration and exploitation of opportunities, and their need to find out what has happened through an investigation. While sometimes working alone, interactions with other lawyers as well as cocreation of knowledge with clients require an approach to knowledge management.

Knowledge management refers to a set of management activities aimed at designing and influencing knowledge creation and integration as well as the sharing of knowledge (McIver et al., 2013). Knowledge management is the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets (Nath, 2021). Learning is associated with knowledge management where learning is concerned with observation and reflection, formation of concepts and generalization, and testing concepts and ideas in real situations (Lee, 2020; Lopes and Fernandes, 2021).

Lawyers can be defined as knowledge workers. They are professionals who have gained knowledge through formal education (explicit) and learning (tacit). Often, there is some variation in the quality of their education and learning. The value of professionals’ education tends to last throughout their careers. For example, lawyers in Norway are asked whether they got the good grade of “laud” even 30 years after graduation. Professionals’ prestige (based partly on the institutions from which they obtained their education) is a valuable organizational resource because of the elite social networks that provide access to valuable external resources for the firm (Hitt et al., 2001).

After completing their advanced educational requirements, most professionals enter their careers as associates in law. In this role, they continue to learn and thus, they gain significant tacit knowledge through “learning by doing.” Therefore, they largely bring explicit knowledge derived from formal education into their firms and build tacit knowledge through experience (Hitt et al., 2001).

Coinciding with a move to professional management, law firms have increased their emphasis on billable hours for attorneys.