Jean O’Grady writes for TR Westlaw…
The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing economic crisis is not the first law firm disruption of the 21st century. The Great Recession of 2008 was a slow-moving storm that shifted the balance of power from law firms to their clients.
By contrast, COVID-19 was like an earthquake that tore apart the landscape overnight and forced law firms into a twilight zone between the past and their transformed future. A firm’s response and resiliency depended on where the organization fell along the spectrum of agility, infrastructure, digital knowledge, and collaboration tools.
In is biography Call Sign Chaos, retired U.S. Marine General James Mattis articulates three drivers of wartime knowledge sharing: housekeeping, decision-making, and alarms. The Mattis KM checklist for “under the gun” decision-making is succinct: What do I know, who needs to know it, and have I told them?
At the onset of the current crisis, knowledge management professionals were simultaneously challenged with assuring that both administrators and lawyers had access to existing knowledge resources while aggregating and disseminating the tsunami of laws, regulations, and policies that were emanating at warp speed from every level of government. Seemingly overnight every law firm had to assemble pandemic teams to advise on how the firm should respond internally to stay-at-home orders while advising clients on how to protect their supply chains, their employees, their contracts, and their own customers in an emerging area of “pandemic law.”
Read more at https://www.legalexecutiveinstitute.com/practice-innovations-special-edition-covid-19-knowledge-management/
