by Steven A. Lastres

Since the earliest days of libraries, librarians have served as knowledge managers. Whether they were maintaining the scrolls at the Library of Alexandria, creating the catalog for the House of Wisdom (a Ninth Century Islamic library), or assembling annotated links for the law firm intranet, law librarians have always been in the forefront of organizing information and adding value to it. Librarians have long excelled at getting information into the hands of the people who need it. The precise definition of knowledge management (KM) is an elusive one, but one pillar of KM practice holds that knowledge management "is the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets."¹

Prior to the advent of the Web, most of the work of the modern librarian in a law firm was demand-driven. Librarians answered reference and research questions, circulated periodicals, alerted lawyers to the tables of contents of law reviews, and pushed out news alerts, among other tasks. Their aim then was the same as it is today: getting the right information into the hands of the people who can make the best use of it. What has changed is that the librarian needs to wear a new hat–that of a business manager.

The array of tools available to today's librarian has driven that change. No longer restricted to offering only upon-request services, law librarians can instead embrace a broader view of their professional role. They actively manage a firm's information assets rather than passively respond to requests. Those information assets are no longer just pay-for subscriptions. Instead, those assets may include internal documents (including precedents, models, best-practice guides), value-added annotations to existing resources, and a host of other assets far afield from the newspapers and law reviews that were formerly the librarians' major focus.

KM, as evolved from traditional librarianship, today means identifying business opportunities within a law firm that help lawyers practice more efficiently and effectively. Librarians need to understand how lawyers work, not just anticipate what their information needs will be. As director of Library and Knowledge Management, I oversee an evolving system that not only delivers traditional library services to our lawyers but also embraces tools that can help our lawyers get more done in a day. We try to be alert to business needs and then figure out the best way to address them.

For example, our lawyers were overloaded with e-mail messages they needed to process every day. Part of the e-mail avalanche inundating the legal staff came from the library in the form of daily updates, electronic subscriptions, and other useful but overwhelming electronic content.

The library decided to approach this as a business opportunity: What can we do to solve this problem? We developed a business case. We stated the current situation, analyzed what needed to be fixed, and then actively searched for solutions. We estimated the return on investment (ROI), because a solution that does not save time or money is not an effective one. After trials with a number of products, we decided to subscribe to Ozmosys to handle our electronic distributions. Lawyers can now receive one e-mail communication a day containing an easy-to-review list of headlines from their selected information sources. KM concerns itself with solving the problem of getting the right information to the right people in a way they can make the best use of it.

As librarians change their professional roles in law firms, their efforts at KM must align with their firms' business objectives. Librarians need to become business managers and wrestle with the same issues that the firms' other managers do. If we take the business view, librarians are selling a product (knowledge and information) to a market (the lawyers) that needs to be serviced effectively (the right product), efficiently (at the right time), and cost-effectively (at the right price). Figuring out how to improve upon that business model is what knowledge management is all about. When it comes to knowledge management, the emphasis should be on management.

Why do librarians make good knowledge managers? The answer may be that librarians tend to be more eager to adopt new ways of sharing information than lawyers are. Librarians look at new technologies and services with a critical eye to understand how to meet current and emerging information needs. KM is not technology for technology's sake. Instead, librarians focus on content and its seamless delivery. In many ways, they can decipher what lawyers need more quickly than the lawyers can. (After all, that's what reference interviews are for!) They know the resources, they know how the resources are delivered, and they know how to find the information that lawyers ask for.

In addition to their skills, when it comes to knowing the content available, most librarians fit well into the KM mold because of their technical sophistication. Today's librarians are perfectly at home in the online world. And unlike the past, when any project that lived on a server was automatically the ward of the IT department, KM projects are now managed by librarians. Library staff members drive the selection of tools to deliver content, the adoption of interactive services such as wikis and blogs, and the promotion of KM applications such as work product retrieval. This is a major change in librarianship, in which librarians are innovators and technologists, as well as content managers. Most librarians bring considerable technical savvy to their professional work. Librarians, in short, should select the information resources that best fit the practices they support, but they also should be involved in selecting the best delivery platforms. That includes managing the graphic display of information on portal or intranet pages and creating a Web-based presentation that is easy to use and search.

As librarians adapt to a changing world, it's a good idea to understand some of the changes they face, including these:

"While you wait?" Not any more! The expectation for all-but-instant access to needed information is higher than it has ever been. When e-mail first replaced letters and circulated memos, we saw the same expectation for lag-free communication. With new Web 2.0 tools available such as blogs, wikis, Twitter, and similar tech toys, a fraction of a second is all it takes to think of something and then tell someone else about it. Information ages fast. What knowledge managers need to do is figure out how to aggregate information accurately and quickly in order to offer attorneys real-time access to a vast store of data and documents–from within the firm and from outside it–and then get it there quickly.

Easy access to information is the aim of every good KM program. Anything that stands between an attorney and the information he or she needs is an impediment. Knowledge managers need to minimize those impediments by negotiating contracts with information vendors that

Other considerations in selecting and deploying KM services include the following:

As knowledge management becomes more ingrained in standard legal practice, KM managers need to become experts in three specialized fields: librarianship, legal technology, and business management. Librarians need to understand the technical possibilities–not just the nuts and bolts of the software but also the realistic research needs of the lawyers.

Change is propelling librarians forward in a world where they must adapt to new ways of thinking about the information over which they are stewards. This changing world means new opportunities for librarians, as librarians redefine themselves as KM managers who create value for the firm by effectively managing the information for which they are professionally responsible.

Steven A. Lastres is director of Library and Knowledge Management at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP. His e-mail address is salastres@debevoise.com.