Knowledge management when you do not have a KM team

Knowledge management without a dedicated KM team is how most transactional firms of 20 to 100 lawyers have to approach the problem, whether they have thought about it explicitly or not. The question is not whether to manage firm knowledge but how to do it without the headcount that larger firms use to run it.

What KM actually requires

Knowledge management in a transactional practice has three practical components. The firm needs a reliable store of its best precedents and standard clause positions. It needs a way to keep that store current as the firm's positions evolve and as deals close on agreed terms. And it needs the information to be accessible to fee earners without friction at the moment they need it.

Large firms address this with PSL lawyers, knowledge engineers and dedicated intranet systems. A firm of forty lawyers cannot staff a KM function, and typically cannot justify the infrastructure cost of an enterprise knowledge system either.

The tools-only trap

The instinctive response for a smaller firm is to buy a knowledge repository tool and ask fee earners to populate it. This rarely works. Lawyers are busy. Populating a separate system competes with client work and loses. The repository stays empty or fills with a random selection of documents that one or two conscientious lawyers happened to file, rather than a curated reflection of the firm's positions.

The same problem applies to clause libraries that depend on active maintenance. Without a dedicated person to enforce the process, the library drifts out of date quickly.

Capture as a byproduct of ordinary work

The approach that works for firms without a KM team is to treat capture as a byproduct of deal work rather than a separate activity. When a transaction closes and the final agreed document is filed, that document becomes the updated precedent. When a lawyer drafts a clause a particular way and it survives negotiation, that clause updates the library. The work of the practice becomes the KM function, without any additional process imposed on the team.

Scriptum is built on this model. Knowledge capture happens inside Microsoft Word as your team drafts and negotiates, with no separate filing step required. To see how it works in practice, book a demo and we can walk you through a live example.