Knowledge management
What in the old days we used to call a librarian, but since that role can be safely covered by Google, now a person who professes to know all about document assembly, artificial intelligence, machine learning, distributed ledger technology and smart contracts, but actually just knows more about them than the General Counsel, and is therefore assured tenure as long as she can keep up with the latest buzzwords.
But in knowledge management is fundamental part of excellent legal practice. We all do it — the JC is basically a knowledge management system — there is a scale opportunity if you can get people to share their systems in an intiutive way. The best example of this is, of course, Wikipedia. But the scale is literally enormous: wikipedia has 900,000,000 users, but only 125,000 odd active editors, each month[1]
If your organisation is like most, you'll have an online repository of consistent agreement templates, all tagged with relevant metadata and correctly taxonomised so that finding exactly what you're looking for is a breeze, and consistency and coherence across your platform is assured automatically.
You'll also have a well-maintained central library of treasury, tax, legal, compliance and credit policies hyperlinked to a knowhow system and to the template library.
All the knowhow will be kept up-to-date and adjusted to meet shifting market standards and the changing regulatory environment, and you'll have no real need for help organising, rationalising or consolidating this body of information.
Right?
It seems to big a job to take on and certainly, in these headcount-constrained times, the poor old inhouse lawyer will have trouble getting to important but low urgency tasks like these. Yet every day institutional knowledge walks out the door. The time you could save and additional resources you'd free up to focus on clients, your documents and policies were in shape, could make a significant impact on your top line, not just the bottom one.