KM Trends
Emerging knowledge management trends for the corporate legal department.
KM Trends
Emerging knowledge management trends for the corporate legal department.
Legal departments face multiple challenges in 2020.
As businesses and markets grow in complexity the legal team is a key advisor to the business and is expected to create measurable value for the organisation. Legal departments looking to streamline internal processes and reduce time on duplicate work should be looking to knowledge management (KM) as part of their suite of legal operations solutions and business management processes.
The ALG Knowledge team have seen some key themes emerge recently which will be of interest to corporate legal departments.
1. Focus on the building blocks of KM
There are various recognised principles to KM. These principles are the building blocks of the corporate department's KM strategy.
For the corporate team who are getting started with KM or renewing a KM effort, the most important piece of advice is to focus on what will matter and make a difference to your team and not on what you think a legal team should be looking at. Pick and choose the approaches that will make the most meaningful improvement to your teams' day-to-day, and start there.
2. Place people at the centre of KM
It is undeniable that technology has taken centre stage in legal KM conversations over the last number of years. While technology is often the enabler of KM progress, the people and the processes that the technology support need to be firmly aligned to ensure that the time, energy and other resources put in to these services generate measurable business results.
Technology introduced without factoring in the people and processes it needs to service and that will be required to maintain and develop it, is destined to end up as a frustrating piece of 'shelf-ware'.
Knowledge, and in particular the ability to retrieve and share core business information, is increasingly seen as a critical process of an efficient and effective legal team.
At ALG the Knowledge Team have been working for over two decades with ALG lawyers and now provide direct knowledge support to clients in a number of different ways. Whether your team is at the start of their KM journey or has travelled some way down the path, talk to the ALG Knowledge team about our experience and lessons learned.
To learn more about some of the work that the ALG Knowledge team has embarked on with client legal departments, read the case studies on KnowledgePlus. The KnowledgePlus extranet is available exclusively to A&L Goodbody clients.