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Chairperson Leona Blanco

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Welcome to the Ark Group Knowledge Management in the Legal Profession Forum -implementing KM initiatives that make a difference in the firm - engaging lawyers in KM, KM

implementation and reviews, social and mobile technology, culture change.

In the last half of the last century, the world moved from an industrial society to an informationsociety. You could argue that we are now transitioning from an information society to aknowledge society. The difference between information and knowledge is that computers haveinformation and people have knowledge - that is, people know what the information means.

As the saying goes: "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts". i The factsare information, the opinion is knowledge. While facts beat opinions that aren't in alignment withthe facts, once the facts are established, it is the best opinion on the given facts - that is, the bestapplication of knowledge to the problem - that will win.

Consequently, for most organisations knowledge is their key differentiator - it is the basis of theirbusiness and at the heart of their competitive advantage. This is amplified in information basedbusinesses like law firms. As such, managing something as seemingly intangible as knowledgeneeds to be a core business strategy.

There is also an increasing abundance of knowledge available. Individuals are bombarded withinformation almost continually. Some - probably most - of this needs no action taken on it, someshould be outright ignored. Some of the information needs to be codified into knowledge. Not onlyis this production of knowledge increasing but the rate of the production of knowledge is itselfincreasing. This makes knowledge management even more crucial.ii 

Law firm knowledge managers often feel that they are being asked to do more with less.

Now, you can't actually do more with less - you can do something different and that somethingdifferent may be more effective but you can't actually do more of the same for less. However, ifthe production of knowledge - both the volume of knowledge and the rate of production of moreknowledge - is increasing then simply through the passing of time you will be asked to do morewith less.

So we need to become more effective. However, there is a problem - there are human limits thatput a ceiling on our ability to absorb, process and retain knowledge.

Most of us by now are familiar with Dunbar's Number iii: British anthropologist Robin Dunbartheorised that the number of social group members a primate can track and can keep a socialrelationship with is directly proportional to the size of the neocortex.

For humans this number is around 150.

As knowledge managers, this type of research has a compelling message. The Dunbar numbertells us that human knowledge - in this instance, knowledge of a person's social network - haslimits.

By extension, this informs us that, as amazing as the human brain is, there are limits to the

amount of knowledge that we can formulate, process and store. Beyond this, we are going toneed help.

Fortunately, help is on its way.

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Thirty years ago (1982), a personal computing device of the day - the Osborne Executiveportable computeriv - weighed 13kg and cost $2,495. The phone that many people carry in their

pocket, the iPhone, is 1/100 of the weight, 100 times faster and costs a tenth of the price.

For a more recent example, the phone in your pocket is probably as fast and has similar capacityto your desktop computer of just over a decade ago.

Moore's Law states that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on anintegrated circuit doubles approximately every two yearsv. This affects things like processorspeed and memory capacity so that these are improving at an exponential rate as well.

For a long time, due to capacity and processing constraints, our personal computers have beenmostly information processing devices - they have been excellent at it, augmenting areas that ourhuman brains are weak at: speed of computation, and storing and processing vast amounts ofdata quickly. If Moore's Law keeps holding, then by the year 2020 your personal computer will be

able to process information as fast as the human brain. We are in a transition phase frompersonal information devices to personal knowledge assistants. Already there are systems thatare available for knowledge in your pocket:

Siri on the iPhone 4S can work out what you mean when you say "Will I need an umbrellathis afternoon?" not just parsing voice to text and processing the meaning of that text, butknowing why you would need an umbrella, where you are located in the world, what time"this afternoon" means and what the weather will be.

a software system called Summly parses and summarizes web content into bullet pointson your iPhone.

Symantec have introduced predictive coding into document classification in a productcalled Clearwell eDiscovery Platform as discussed in Lawyer's Weekly last week.

So we see that KM systems are becoming increasingly available, and at the personal devicelevel, and, like all things in IT, this trend will accelerate.

Knowledge sharing is key to KM and thus organisational successvi. However, sharing knowledge

requires an open mindset which is challenging for law firms where lawyers are individuallycompeting for billable time and to be seen as the expert.

We can see this changing in the current generation of lawyers who are more used to sharinginformation - possibly too much information - online with social media tools like Facebook andTwitter.

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There is a large demographic and thus cultural shift with the current generation of lawyers. In1988 20% of lawyers were female; now 46% are female, and this is expected to continue withmore females studying law than males.

One out of every ten of solicitors has been admitted for less than a year, nearly a third for fiveyears or less.

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In the last year in NSW:

The profession grew 4%

Females increased 6%

60% of new practising certificates issued were to females

15% of solicitors work part time (21% of females, 10% of males)

In the next five years:

The number of lawyers will increase (both absolute numbers and per capita)

The number of law firms will increase

The number of sole practitioner law firms will increase

More than half of all legal practitioners will be female, up from 20% twenty years ago  – non-private practitioners are already over 50% female and will go to over 60% female

Corporate sector will rise to around 20%; government will be steady at about 10%

There will be fewer older, male solicitors

Average age of legal practitioners will fall

Flexible work arrangements will increase

So there is a gender balance shift and an age balance shift. With that has come an IT literacyshift with a corresponding cultural shift.

There is also a work/life balance shift which is being increasingly assisted by technology. Emailsand the internet were relatively new technologies for law firms just over a decade ago. Now youhave them in your pocket.

I believe this is a significant time for our profession, where the three facets of knowledgemanagement are converging:

Technology

Organisational (or cultural)

Ecological (interactions of people, systems and knowledge)

The technology is becoming more powerful, more personal and ubiquitous; we have younger,more technically adept people moving into positions of power in our firms, yielding a cultural shift;and the intersections between people and systems, and the knowledge assets that they manage,are becoming seamless and frictionless.

At the heart of KM is culture - developing a culture of learning and a culture of sharing. I hope that

you take advantage of the opportunity to share and learn here today, learning from the speakersas they share their experiences, sharing your questions at the end of the sessions, and sharingyour experiences with your fellow delegates during the refreshment breaks.

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After all, knowledge is about connections.

For example, the most important development in telephony was not the invention of the firsttelephone but the installation of the second telephone.

The more connections there are, the more value the system has. Similarly, the more connectionsyou can make here today - between information, between experiences and between people - themore you will get from this conference.

i http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Daniel_Patrick_Moynihan  ii http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/elj/jilt/2006_1/kabene/kabene.pdf  iii http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number  iv http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Executive  v http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law  vi http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/kcafe  vii http://www.lawsociety.com.au/uploads/filelibrary/1106097418251_0.4707530669071349.pdf