Knowledge

Time to Switch off the Database?

 Many managing partners and heads of law department endeavour to set up databases with standard documents to cut  lawyers’ time spent on writing.

It has become a must for three reasons. It is an obvious way to leverage the firm’s or the department’s knowledge, and therefore to increase profitability. It makes work more productive (in a market where pressure on costs is increasing, productivity is becoming the new game in town). Finally, it enhances quality management.

However, over-relying on the database may be dangerous. This has to do with the difference between information and knowledge. Information is what has been digitalised in the database. Knowledge is  what is in people’s mind. The process by which people transform information into knowledge is called “learning”. And every learning expert will tell you that the best learning strategy is “learning by doing”. Or, in your case, learning by writing.

The calling of professionals is to stand out by their knowledge. That is what makes them different from legal services providers or database operators.  This is what commands higher fees. To have outstanding knowledge, they must learn a lot, and therefore write a lot.

If you want your people to grow into accomplished professionals, and keep growing, allow them, from time to time, to set the database aside.  Let them write. From scratch. Let them reinvent the wheel, or even better, innovate. Let them struggle with the words, the sentences, the paragraphs, the definitions, and the overall document structure. Let them sharpen their mind. Let them find their way in the jungle. Don’t make their life easy.  Remember, you are in a profession: you don’t want only effective producers: you also want intelligent people.

However, once the learning process is completed, when information has been transformed into effective knowledge, writing the entire stuff from scratch is obviously a waste of time. At that point, there is no excuse for not switching on the database. It is an individual decision, though: in the same firm, at the same time, some lawyers may still need to write a certain document from scratch (they are still climbing the learning curve), while others, who have completed the learning journey in relation to the same document, should clearly let the database do the work.

Antoine Henry de Frahan | 11 April 2006 |