Few challenges within sophisticated and far-flung law firms seem as difficult to get right as Knowledge Management, and I've recently been exploring some theories as to why this is so.  After all, lawyers of all people should excel at KM—information and expertise are literally all we have to sell—and one would think that a cohort that skews towards highly educated, left-brainy, articulate, and process-centric could do KM in their sleep.  Counter-intuitively, however, we know that we can't.

Pondering this from the 50,000 foot level, I'm prepared to propose a theory:  As social creatures distinguished from the rest of the mammalian order primarily by our capacity for language (and with the "invention" of civilization dependent foremost upon the invention of writing), we have evolved with a powerful tendency to learn through close associates in groups.   This means that, within a law firm, informal organizational networks should provide the most powerful—because most natural—platform for "management" (creation, storage, distribution, and re-use) of knowledge.

The problem arises when the informal networks do not map 1-to-1 to the organizational chart, and they never do.  Indeed, at Harvard Business School's "Working Knowledge," "How Org Charts Lie" tells precisely such a story:

"we are all dramatically affected by information flow and webs of relationships within social networks. These networks often are not depicted on any formal chart, but they are intricately intertwined with an organization's performance, the way it develops and executes strategy, and its ability to innovate. For most of us, networks also have a great deal to do with our personal productivity, learning, and career success."

What's this got to do with KM, again?  Start with first principles:  The goal of KM is not to curate and preserve "knowledge" for its own sake, but to get your talented professionals communicating, collaborating, and working together seamlessly, sharing assumptions about objectives and the elements of the toolkit needed to get there. 

But if the actual, functioning network diverges from the formal hierarchy, exhortations to collaborate better along the lines of the hierarchy will fall on deaf ears.  For example, if a senior associate has a reputation for knowing more than anyone else about drafting acquisition papers, it's far more likely that other associates will go to him for assistance than that they'll go to the partner they're actually working with on an acquisition.  Again, to quote:

"Most executives will tell you that effective collaboration is critical to their organization's strategic success. Most, in candid moments, will also admit that they have invested a great deal of time and money to promote collaboration, with few or no results. Often, managers undertake such initiatives without understanding the inner workings of a network, relying on an implicit philosophy that more communication and collaboration are better. For example, managers may implement collaborative technologies with the vague notion that they will help employees interact more seamlessly and that this will improve the quality of their work." [emphasis supplied]

Does this sound like any "failed" KM initiatives you've ever  heard of?

Now pretend you've accurately diagnosed the real networks-on-the-ground that matter at your firm; you're still not exactly home-free with KM. 

KM at law firms is 95% a cultural issue and 5% a technology issue.  The technology platform is necessary, but by no stretch of the imagination sufficient.  The greatest impediment to success of KM is often a culture of not-sharing, and if that's really and truly descriptive of your firm, you can stop reading now.  I wish you godspeed, because you're going to need it.

For the rest of us, assuming your firm's lawyers are willing to collaborate, or at least to say out loud that they understand its value, the hardest obstacle can simply be changing the way they work, if only in the slightest increment.  Since more or less the first time I ever thought of the issue, I've assumed that if contributing to a KM initiative requires a lawyer to spend as little as an extra five minutes at the end of a matter "feeding" the system, the initiative is dead on arrival. 

This is not irrational behavior:  To the contrary, the lawyer thinks or assumes they've internalized all the knowledge worth having about the matter, so a fortiori inputting it into the system will never do them personally any good.  Meanwhile, it's not billable time.

If you get to this point, you may be facing the challenge of altering behavior, which is known in the literature as "change management."  Daunting as it may be, it has and can be done.  McKinsey has lots to say on this, as will I.