Hey, you there! Heard about knowledge management (KM) but don't know where to start? Don't worry, there's a whole number of people just like you. At least 60 of them were at the “Practical Advice on Building a Knowledge Management Roadmap” session at the 2018 CLOC Conference. I'm right with you, too, which is why I sat in on the beginners-portion of the session, led by Emily Colantino, director of knowledge management at Baker McKenzie's energy, mining and infrastructure industry group, and Steve Harmon, vice president and deputy general counsel at Cisco.

In their half of the panel, Colantino and Harmon led newcomers through a few ways to start their own KM systems. Here's how they said to get started:

Lesson 1: Come Up With a Strategy

In a pre-CLOC survey that Colantino shared, 40 percent of the roughly 160 respondents had no KM plan in place. But even if it's not a perfectly formed strategy from day one, Colantino posited, “We would offer to you that even starting a KM plan would be a good way to get your program off and running.”

Harmon noted that finding a basis for a knowledge management strategy reminded him of Simon Sinek's book “Start With Why.” “You need to figure out what the purpose is of having a KM program in the first place. Why do we have it?”

For Cisco, the answer to that question stemmed from what he said was GC Mark Chandler's overall vision for the legal department: “to enable the business to design, build and sell its products in a legal and efficient way.” Or, as Harmon put it, “The only reason I get paid is there are a bunch of talented engineers building products to sell.”

From there, the knowledge management strategy can begin to form in alignment with the organization's overall goals. Oftentimes, Harmon added, that means standardized, repeatable processes that help common problem areas: “The reality in most legal organizations is that we don't need to produce art; we need to produce prints.”

Lesson 2: Finding Resources Through Incentives

What good is a knowledge management system if nobody wants to contribute to it? That's what a lot of first-time KM implementations face, so actually getting the system up and running may take some incentives.

Harmon likened it to an economics issue, saying, “Everyone wants to feed from the fishery, but nobody wants to supply the fish. There's a lot of demand for people to pull things from the system, but not as much demand to supply things to the system.”

At Cisco, he said, one way to encourage contributions to the KM system was to focus on career goals. “In the context of our knowledge management efforts, if you're one of the largest contributors to our knowledge management open source systems, and assuming that what you contribute is worthwhile, it's one of the best ways to set yourself apart from your peers.”

For Baker McKenzie, meanwhile, Colantino added that it's important to get creative, and to cast a wide net when finding people to possibly contribute. “I've always been surprised that when I ask a question to a large number of people, those who raise their hands are ones I might not have thought of in the first place,” she explained.

Lesson 3: Create a Culture

So you have a plan, and you have some initial buy-in. How do you make sure it's sustainable? Colantino said what's necessary is “establishing a culture that encourages and rewards knowledge sharing.”

She added, “The tone needs to come from the top. The key stakeholders need to be consulted on your strategy and buy in.” At Baker McKenzie, this means designated “knowledge champions”—people from the executive team or, in the case of law firms, partners that are appraised of and have a stake in the KM system's success.

Harmon also called “this the hardest piece of KM.” In one example he recounted, an internal process organization implemented a rule: Anyone that assigns a high threshold of complexity to a certain project can't close the case unless they confirm that whatever made it complex is noted in the knowledge management tool. This set up a quandary for those who didn't want to contribute: They needed throughput to be high with complex work, so they couldn't put off the cases, even if they didn't want to contribute.

Lesson 4: Starting Simple With Document Collection

Even if you don't have a formal knowledge management system, you probably have documents that attorneys use to help one another. Colantino said these documents are a great place to start collecting for your new system, explaining, “Start with what you have, because you probably have more than you think you have.”

The two important aspects for all documents in the system, she explained, are that they need to be useful and easy to get to. Concerning the latter, she added, “It doesn't matter what documents you have if you can't get to them. … You need to choose a level of complexity that mirrors your company.”

This also means routine maintenance of articles that are out of date. She recounted that upon starting a KM system a few years ago, Baker McKenzie noticed that some of the most-read documents were introductory topics that hadn't been updated since the early 2000s. “Stale content immediately discredits the system,” she explained.

Harmon agreed, adding that it's “kind of surgery with an ax” in deciding an updating and deletion process for old KM system content. “I tend to take the view that curation is a high-margin exercise, but it's high cost as well,” he explained.

Lesson 5: Standardize and Streamline Your Forms

Finally, they noted that many documents can be standardized for use throughout an organization, especially those documents that are often developed in multiple practice areas throughout the practice. Similar to regular document analysis, Colantino explained that these standard forms need to be useful, accessible, and up-to-date. Furthermore, they need to be prioritized for the highest volume of legal work.

“I find that standard-form documents lend themselves to a quantitative analysis,” she said. “If we have two documents that take two hours a piece for 52 weeks—take two by two by 52, and that's over 200 hours saved.”

She said that these standard forms can come from a number of places, including internal documents, industry organization documents like the American Bar Association or state bars like the New York State Bar Association, companies that sell these documents like Practical Law Co., and even publicly filed boilerplate documents.