This Friday, March 12th, I’ll be presenting at the Legal Marketing Association in Denver, CO with Meredith Williams, Director of Knowledge Management at Baker Donelson and Patrick DiDomenico, Chief Knowledge Officer at Gibbons P.C. in a session titled “Leveraging Knowledge Management to Increase Efficiency and Improve Your Firm’s Bottom Line”. 

This is a great topic, and an increasingly common discussion with new audiences inside law firms, outside of the typical discussions we have with law firm knowledge management and IT professionals.  I’ve seen a convergence between knowledge management and marketing technologies over the past few years, particularly over the past 12 months as firms continue to seek opportunities to reduce overall technology and marketing spend.  KM, IT, marketing and business development have been hit especially hard with staff reductions and slashed budgets, resulting in critical changes in how they operate under the “do more with less” mandate from partners. 

Whether creating pitch books, responding to RFPs, identifying and researching prospective clients, or simply knowing more about a firm’s existing client base, marketing and business development professionals require efficient access to information from many sources.  KM is all about capturing, organizing and reusing knowledge and information in order to drive consistency, repeatability and efficiency.  By collaborating together, KM, marketing and business development professionals can all leverage these tools and approaches to effectively meet their information challenges head-on while making better use of the existing investments in IT systems and content services.  A true win-win for the firm, if managed correctly.

In this session, Meredith, Patrick and I will discuss the use of KM people, process and tools to improve access to information, to facilitate knowledge sharing and reuse, and to drive the efficiencies necessary in today’s economy to improve firm profitability and performance.  I will focus on the technologies available today that support these goals and trends that we are seeing around the use of these technologies.

I had the pleasure of presenting with both Meredith and Patrick at Legal Tech New York in February, and I’m looking forward to speaking with them again this week.  This is my first trip to the LMA conference, and I’m also looking forward to the opportunity to talking with others in attendance about how KM, IT, marketing and business development can better collaborate to achieve common goals.  If you’re attending, I’d love to chat – please feel free to shoot me an email or stop by the Hubbard One booth #309/311.