First off, apologies for the break. I’ve been on holidays, recovering from jet-lag, and suffering social activity fatigue. Also, Twitter (you can follow me at twitter.com/neilrichards) makes for a quick way to participate on-line without the burden of writing a blog post.

On with the show.

Quite a long time ago, my friend Mark Gould posted a comment in response to a post about Sharepoint. Mark’s queried why firms should consider adopting Sharepoint as it is fraught with risks (such as unmanageable group growth).  I had a similar exchange with Mary Abraham on Twitter, but am unable to recall the log from Twitter at the moment.

“Why Sharepoint?” is a worthy question and I’ll look to management guru, the late Peter Drucker to help me answer it.

In his book “The Effective Excecutive” Drucker classifies four types of problems:

1. Truly Generic (individual occurrence of a problem is a symptom of a common issue)
2. Generic, but Unique for the individual institution (i.e. merger)
3. Truly exceptional, truly unique (coping with a Black Swan event)
4. Early manifestation of a new generic problem (responding to toxic assets)

Today, I’ll outline what these “problems” look like in law-firm speak. Tomorrow, I’ll share why I feel Sharepoint is suitable in addressing some of these.

Of the four types of problems, only the Truly Generic is relevant to our discussion. However if you are interested in reading more about the other classes of problem, Sources of Insight provides a quick breakdown.

Truly Generic problems

Whenever Acme Partners LLP needs to hire new trainees they go to the law schools. Sometimes they find themselves hiring well after the end of the year, with all the top students having already signed training contracts. Other times, they are mid-year, with students still months away from being ready to begin their legal career in full.

With such an ad hoc approach, the firm rarely gets to speak with the top students and even more rarely, is able to hire one. After years of only hiring students at the lower-range, quality is poor, profits are low and partners are unable to afford that second Ferrari.

Then one year, they happen to be hiring just as the law students are seeking their Training Contracts. With exposure to more students, Acme Partners land some high-quality prospects. Reflecting on their success, one astute Partner asks:

“Why don’t we just hire at this time every year? We might not be able to get the very best just yet, but we’ll get better than we normally do.”

And so a policy to only hire as students complete their law course is born.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 3:22 am and is filed under KM, Law firms, Sharepoint. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.