Document Management & Knowledge Management

Everyone today at law firms or legal departments now talk about document management (DM) and knowledge management (KM). These words are often used separately but they are inexplicably tied with each other and yet have subtle differences between each other. By definition of services provided by law firms or work done by legal departments, there is an explicable amount of documents that gets generated. From multiple draft versions being shared with clients or vendors to final versions being filed officially; from queries to questionnaires to articles. Lots of content being generated and stored without much understanding of DM and KM. Or to put in much clear words, without much understanding of structured content and unstructured content. And the question is are the law firms or legal departments putting that much effort to understand the difference?

A search about difference between DM and KM yields a lot of results that help in understanding - from brief to detailed - about what is DM and KM. One of best articles, in my opinion, was written by Nav Chakravarti. Through this article Nav has explained the difference between DM and KM. Another article of great interest is from Ron Friedmann. Through this article, Ron has particularly emphasized on necessity of KM in law firms. I would here just outline the major differences, gathered from the articles and my experience so far. 

1. DM is essentially storing documents created with a definite purpose for easy retrieval at later stages. On contrary, KM is all about capturing knowledge or experience of document creator for later reference. 

2. DM is focused on 'structured' work products delivered to an audience - client, management, training etc. KM is all about 'non-structured' context gathered over a period of time.

DM has become a habit now due to ease of creating and storing document. Create a word document, save it with a name in a certain folder and it is done. While KM for the same document requires the document be 'indexed' to capture the context of the document. At same time, one cannot just dump documents in some database accessible via web-based applications (also known as document management systems or DMS). Lets say in one example, in a law firm, the workflow was designed to capture and store each and every version of work product and ancillary documents (researches, disclosures etc.) created for a particular matter - DM done; retrieve any document of the matter by searching for the matter or client; perfect but with a catch - you should remember the matter to precisely get the document. Now just before closing the matter, manually indexing was performed to assign metadata that captured context - KM done; perfect but with a catch - this system does not capture articles, query responses. In another example, there is no KM in a law firm and all documents are dumped in DMS instead of using shared drives. Either of the practices result in huge dump of documents with haphazard indexing and we are back to square one. 

There are various knowledge management solutions that work on top of the DMS to index the document. But what is lacking is understanding the difference and training users in the same. I do not see much thrust being given on this point by the law firms and legal departments. How can I prove it?by asking a simple question- when you want a query to be answered or a questionnaire from client to be filled up do you ask your user to search for it or do you search on DMS? 

Law firms and the legal departments can ingrain the below practices as 'values' and monitor the same to ensure DM and KM are done to gain maximum benefit. 

1. Allow users to create documents on shared drives while working on a matter or responding to query or writing an article. Do not keep any version on DMS until finalized.

2.Once finalized and ready to be filed or already filed or sent to client, save a copy on DMS with proper indexing; and delete copies from shared drives. 

3. Indexing to capture context and wisdom of user creating the document - hence no predefined list but allow manual tagging. 

4. Provide incentives to encourage users to perform indexing such as allowing name of the author to be prominently featured on search results and rewarding the user with highest score. 

5. Like in my previous article, have a dedicated team of process consultants who can be knowledge managers.

Feel free to drop your comments. 

x