Can law firms even do KM?

I've argued that lawyers are the archetypal knowledge workers and law firms an ideal place to implement knowledge management. Responding to the chorus of objections - ranging from lawyers don't get it to law firms are too hierarchical, siloed, ossified (and many other, less kind descriptives) - I've cheerfully asserted, "Yeah, but if we can figure KM out and get it right for lawyers and law firms, we'll have something that should be exportable to any knowledge work environment."

I still think that's true, but a couple of things items I've read over the last few days have me wondering how long the process could take and whether the answers to the KM puzzle will be discovered elsewhere sooner. Bill Ives, over at Portals and KM, commented on James Robertson's post at Column Two, entitled Hierarchical organisations are killing knowledge management.

Both blogs link to a recent article in CIO [broken link to article removed] discussing Jeff Nielsen's book, The Myth of Leadership: Creating Leaderless Organizations. According to CIO, the "secret to KM success" is revealed when Nielsen

posits that a new management paradigm — one that eschews hierarchy and rank-based leadership in favor of peer-based thinking — represents the future of business. In Nielsen's peer-based world, information sharing and decision-making are open, transparent processes ... with collective groups of employees who share everything they know and make company decisions accordingly.

I've worked in and around litigation teams and deal-making groups that operated in this open, transparent, sharing way - for short periods, to get the job done.

But I'm not aware of any law firm that qualifies.

If CIO and Nielsen are right that "there's little hope for KM in a rank-based world," then law firms as we know them are in deeper trouble than I have thought. I've joined the calls for changing the culture of law firms, especially the "eat what you kill" compensation structures, to provide genuine incentives for legal knowledge workers to become knowledge sharers. CIO reports, however:

While the idea sounds good, Nielsen says such efforts will fail if the organization overall still clings to its rank-based structure. The managers are still essentially "telling you that you have to contribute to a knowledge system," Nielsen says. Rather than a sense of communal participation, the result is invariably secrecy, distrust and a feeling of being commanded and controlled, he believes.

So it may be that the culture changes necessary for law firms to succeed at KM will be more drastic than current "leaders" are capable of accepting. Nielsen "finds it unlikely that current business leaders who manage in a hierarchical fashion will change their minds." Santosus concludes they are "a fading breed, and once gone, will be replaced by an organizational structure in which KM finally can flourish."

If so, it could take years (decades?) of painfully slow evolution to create viable, sustainable KM processes in law firms. Do we need to find the answers elsewhere and import them into law firms?

That question leads to another recent item, a post on the AOK list (FREE registration here) from Patrick Murphy suggesting that "a publishing company may be the archetypal OKM model, and would be worth analyzing as a case study." He recommends a thought-provoking paper by Richard Rorty describing the rise of a literary culture and wonders, "Perhaps the organization of the future will hew to the 'literary' model as embodied in a journalistic enterprise."

Is that where we need to look for KM models that will work when law firms are ready? Are any law firms ready to become the incubators now?

2019 UPDATE:

Thanks to Emil Hajric for pointing out the broken CIO article link. Emil is the founder and CEO of Helpjuice, a web-hosted knowledge base software tool. He's also written a helpful ebook, Knowledge Management: A Theoretical and Practical Guide for Knowledge Management in Your Organization.

On the topic of flatter, self-managed, "leaderless" organizations, I've been inspired by the many real-world examples of companies – and their visionary leaders – reviewed by Frederic Laloux in Reinventing Organizations (2014).