Requiem for the billiable hour. Rick Klau's posting nails it.  Clients aren't going to pay lawyers for inefficiency, and they shouldn't. [Ernie the Attorney]

The more interesting question is how long will it take lawyers to get what clients already get. The firms that I have worked with all seem to be schizophrenic around this topic. One at a a time, every attorney I've spoken with admits that billable hours are dead. Organizationally, I have yet to encounter a law firm that is ready to move to a new economic arrangement.

When your economic model has run its course, that doesn't mean you're ready to abandon it emotionally.

10:53:20 PM •  • comment  

I suspect that Ernie doesn't understand knowledge management the same way that Sam Ervin was just a simple country lawyer.  Here are a few extracts from his excellent piece on KM (with a thank you to Scoble for the initial pointer):

"Knowledge Management" to me suggests an approach that not only creates a formal system for categorizing knowledge (i.e. setting up a database that indexes documents and forces the user to fill in certain fields), but also one that implements a system that is dynamic to catch the little bits of knowledge that are in the minds (and hard drives) of the people who work in an organization. 

The key to this concept ...is not centrality, but immediacy.  If you could get workers to 'blog their ideas everyday then the information that is fed to the central place would always be updated.  And because people could be confident that it was updated they would feel drawn to add their own knowledge. 

One of the hardest aspects of KM to deal with is context. Most formal KM systems fail because they have no useful way to capture the context surrounding what Ernie labels as the formal system. Context matters because what you want to know six months later is what were they (or you for that matter) thinking when they created that document or spreadsheet. So a blog that is updated routinely provides a natural complement to the formal system. Because it is immediate, it is more likely to reflect the contextual details that will be relevant later.

Here's an experiment you can try. Find some final product on your hard drive or in your file cabinet that's at least six months old; a report to management, a final contract, a proposal to a client. You can see the specific things that are there on the page or in the file. What can you remember about why you made that particular choice, about why that clause is in the contract. Yet those are precisely the questions you need to answer if you want to reuse this "knowledge object" in a new context.

If you've been keeping a blog, you'll either have the answer right there or the materials that will yield the answer.

This time shifting is also why it's so hard to grasp the value of blogs in a knowledge management ocntext. You need to commit to doing it long enough that you can see how blogs help make context visible and why that matters to getting better leverage out of prior work.

BTW, I've added Ernie the Attorney to my subscriptions in Radio and if I ever run into him face-to-face, I'm holding on to my wallet.  He's a friend of Buzz's and I just met Buzz face-to-face for the first time. These technically literate lawyers are a dangerous breed. :)

4:00:47 PM •  • comment  

Bob Frankston: The Internet is Missing. Because the Internet doesn't treat each use as special, the connectivity itself becomes a commodity whose price declines very rapidly and thus makes imagination, not cost, the limiting factor. This is counter-intuitive to those whose business revolves around maximizing the value of their capital current assets. [Tomalak's Realm]

Another effort to make the underlying value of the Internet architecture apparent to those who would dissect the goose to figure out where the golden eggs are coming from.  You have to invest some time to understand what is possible or impossible, easy or hard, before you can make sensible choices about technology and strategy.

One of the fundamental design strengths of the Internet is that it did not try to solve every problem; it left space open for others to solve problems as they needed to be solved. It takes a very wise designer to know when not to exert control. We do not appear to have many wise designers in the halls of power.

11:44:49 AM •  • comment