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LAW FIRMS trade in knowledge and expertise. Economic uncertainty and an increasingly competitive marketplace for legal services mean that it is more important than ever for firms to maximise their most valuable resource. Technology enables lawyers to create and access up-to-date legal knowledge and know-how extremely quickly from external and internal resources.

Highly sophisticated knowledge management (KM) systems that interface with practice management and client relationship management (CRM) systems enable them to access – and search across – the firm’s entire information and knowledge resources, which increasingly incorporate intranets and extranets as well as Web 2.0 applications, such as blogs, wikis, forums and other collaborative tools. However, the fact that these resources are increasingly prevalent means that they support rather than guarantee a firm’s position in the market.