DISQUS

jasonmarkanderman · 3 months ago

When I used to be in-house counsel, our General Counsel and I wrote all of our outside counsel law firms and asked them: "(1) Do you have any knowledge management (KM) systems?" and "(2) Would you be willing to allow us to access any of your KM systems?" We thought this would be a good idea because straightforward, small deals and IP prosecution were handled exclusively in-house, while large scale M&A and litigation was given to outside counsel, so helping us to do our internal work better would only make us more enamored of a law firm and make them more likely to get the large scale work in the future. Essentially, there was no risk of them losing business. Surprisingly (to us) no one offered us access. Was this because there were few KM systems in existence? Or because of a lack of interest in transparency? I surmise it was a little of both. What do you think?

VMaryAbraham · 3 months ago

To be honest, Jason, I wonder if those firms had appropriate business
processes and technology to support your request? Until issues of security
and ease of access and maintenance are addressed, I expect it would be hard
for many firms to think about providing proprietary information outside the
firewall. In any event, Mallesons has now proven that the technology
exists. So it will be interesting to see which law firms are able to
organize their business process sufficiently to support this new era of
transparency.

- Mary