Joy offers an excellent summary of the barriers to knowledge management and knowledge sharing within law firms. I don't think of law firms as uniquely different from other organizations. It is more that they are an extreme case. As such, there are worthwhile lessons for all organizations.
I agree with Joy that the billable hour model is far and away the largest barrier to effective knowledge sharing in law firms . It is also likely to be the proximate cause of their demise. The intense competition inside law firms draws attention away from the more important threats from the outside. Chief among these are the other professional services firms, accountants and consultants, moving into territory that was once exclusively the legal profession's and the continuing growth of internal counsel in large corporations. Neither of these external strategic threats care about the billable hour; both care a great deal about the productivity and effectiveness of knowledge work. While ever law firm I have dealt with recognizes these threats intellectually, they remain emotionally wed to the billable hour model.
The time and energy it takes to fight your way up the partner ladder in a law firm virtually guarantees that the eventual winners buy into the status quo, especially on an emotional level that can be hard to acknowledge. It seems particularly hard for large firms to address the split between routine work and high-value added work. Few law partners I know are comfortable acknowledging how much of their billings come from the routine work most at risk from a productivity perspective. The competition at Accenture or Deloitte Toche have no problem focusing on taking hours out of that work.
Effective knowledge management and knowledge sharing is essential to the long-term strategic health of law firms while at the same time it is marginally relevant, and possibly counterproductive, in the day-to-day lives of individual partners. This dilemma is most sharply drawn in law firms, but it also exists in most other organizations. Those at the top do not need knowledge management systems. It is the rest of the organization that benefits immediately from effective knowledge management and knowledge sharing.
What makes this such a conundrum is that people climb organization hills by emulating those about them, particularly those at the top. Behaviors that primarily benefit those in the middle and at the bottom fall into the category of getting more exercise because it's good for you. The leadership challenge then lies not in exhortations about what others should do. It lies in the examples that the leaders choose to set. With knowledge sharing those examples need to be about sustained behavior over time. When we see more people operating like Ernie the Attorney, John Robb, and Phil Windley we'll be talking real progress.
Why Rewards?: Because Lawyers Are a Different Breed. In general, I share Jim's skepticism and suspicion of rewards for knowledge sharing. Some people, including Alfie Kohn, think rewards, particularly monetary rewards, are downright manipulative and harmful in organizations. But, law firms are not like other organizational cultures. I'm not certain that a system of rewards would be effective in law firms, but where the competitive culture is so fierce, rewards seem like a logical extension of lawyers' motivational drives.
[...]
An associate, spends at a minimum, seven years working round-the-clock logging hours of billable time. When deciding which associates will become partners (open slots are few), a management committee looks primarily at the number of client hours billed as well as an individual's overall performance. So, new lawyers quickly learn that is is not within their best interest to share knowledge with their colleagues lest they reduce their chances to become a well-paid partner.
The greater the number of client hours logged in a day, the less time left to perform non-billable knowledge sharing. In fact, knowledge management is completely contrary to the hourly billing model. Why should associates do their work more efficiently when they can make more money for the firm by reinventing the wheel? From a partner’s perspective, KM directly cuts into per-partner profitability. Until the traditional lock-step system (i.e. equal profit sharing among partners) changes to a merit-based compensation system, partners will continue to do things the "old-fashioned" way— by the hour.
[...]
[excited utterances][emphasis added]
9:28:57 PM
