MANAGING ORGANISATIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND PRESERVING THE INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL OF LAW FIRMS FOR A COMPETITIVE EDGE IN 21ST CENTURY.

NEED FOR A KNOWLEDGE SYSTEM:

Retaining lawyers’ intellectual capital when they work for firms is crucial for reducing costs and improving response time for clients. Law firms incur massive costs in reinventing the wheel with every new case on hand as they cannot utilise on intellectual capital built in the past. Lawyers change firms and carry knowledge resources, wasting many hours of intellectual assets that belongs to law firms. This not only prevents the efficient creation of a knowledge base from existing resources but also prevents the built-up of substantive future work by harnessing the collective wisdom of different legal teams over the firms life. The central question is:

How can law firms build upon the past expertise of lawyers no longer with the firm?

The law firms need to create a meaningful knowledge base and preserve their intellectual capital to reduce costs and turnaround time. Law firms require a new-age natural language systems where lawyers working on the project make a brief record of precedents that interlink concepts, cases, facts, treaty clauses, and legal principles which reflect on court interpretations. Even with the basic know-how of facts and law, junior solicitor should be able to discover legal principles and find accurate precedents. Knowing a basic norm that applies to facts makes it possible to trace related principles, cases, doctrines, and concepts in a contextual, relatable, and substantive manner. All this related data must provide a visual contextual overview with facts that is searchable and backlinked, forming a formidable information resource that can be readily deployed to reduce client response time.

?TODAY'S OBSOLETE SYSTEMS

A fuzzy or a Boolean search cannot do this and is an obsolete technology for lawyers. The old technology existing today does nothing more than expensive data mining software and is of little utility, entailing huge costs of law firms hiring professional support lawyers (PSL) and with senior lawyers wasting a number of billable hours in constructing information resource. The additional cost of hiring PSL can be saved by using simple Markdown language tools, which use natural language to link concepts directly spoken by senior lawyers and converted into a brief narrative on law that is all searchable in multiple ways. When lawyers don’t have to work outside their brief, you have a knowledge bank continuously getting updated with additions, remarks, and experience of teams across the department and jurisdictions in real-time. Then, you have a reliable, dependable, and ready-to-use knowledge bank, from which even the most untrained junior staff can build case briefs with minimum supervision.

A NEW LEGALTECH: TURNING FACTS INTO LAW

Does your law firm knowledge system have the following features:

- Take down the crux of the judgment and principles directly without the cost of learning new software or language and instantly backlinks with concepts.

- A process-free knowledge recording linking the concepts based on the Zettelkasten system of building knowledge.

- Automatically creates backlinks of related cases to principles and reverse engineers’ law from facts.

- Saves the cost of PSL and uses non-billable lawyer hours to improve the knowledge base by utilising expert knowledge of senior lawyers within the firm.

- Deploy a scalable system that focuses not on complex hierarchy or inaccessible folder system but captures information and connects with the facts of the case to make contextual, relational development of ideas all tagged and linked together to give a pictorial overview.

-Reconstructs past knowledge and instantly enhances more value from the collective wisdom of teams.

- Prevent a lawyer from hoarding knowledge and information, which travels along when they leave the firm.

CONCLUSION

As knowledge management legaltech advances, we will see law firms training in-house junior lawyers to be IT compliant to build a knowledge bank of precedents in area of International Law and International arbitration subjects that are not only complex but very fluid reducing the need of PSL and leveraging better turn around times to meet clients need.

If you want to know more about knowledge systems I used, DM me or comment below and I will reach out with a link to markdown language tool I use.

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