Yerra Solutions Drives Initiative to Establish Legal Industry Standard for Knowledge Management

Global News

11
Sep
2013

Editor

Yerra Solutions AG announced that it is leading an initiative to develop a legal industry standard for assessing and improving the management of knowledge developed and used by lawyers to counsel their clients (Knowledge Management or “KM”). The highest performing Law Departments make effective use of Knowledge Management to increase their productivity and improve the quality of support they provide.

To date there has been no universally recognized standard that serves as a diagnostic framework to enable Law Department managers to gain visibility into how efficiently knowledge is created and leveraged within their organizations.  The KM standard now under development will serve as best practice guidance for developing, implementing and benchmarking a successful KM strategy. The standard will also help Law Departments establish a common language with their law firms to define and validate KM activities.

Corinna Codd, director and general counsel of Yerra Solutions, is chairing the working group which includes representatives from leading global organizations including UBS, Roche, AIG, Sigma Aldrich, Novartis, Barclays, Allen & Overy, and White & Case.  “Establishing an industry standard for KM is long overdue” said George Miller, Senior VP, General Counsel, Sigma Aldrich. “Knowledge management is an area that is difficult to tackle due to its broad nature and the varied definition of its scope. The work of this group will do much to answer these challenges and help GCs derive true value from managing knowledge effectively in their organizations.”

The group received guidance on standards creation from the LEDES Oversight Committee (LOC), the body tasked with supervising the Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) and UTBMS codes.   “While the focus of other UTBMS code sets is to classify the services provided by a legal vendor to its client, the KM codes will largely be used by resources within an organization to enable better understanding of the type, scope and amount of KM tasks and for benchmarking against other organizations.  This is an important and new direction for UTBMS,” remarked Jane Bennitt, president of the LOC.  “We value the leadership of Yerra Solutions and the expertise of the other members of the group in this important initiative.”

Corinna Codd, a lawyer with over 20 years of both private practice and in-house experience, joined Yerra Solutions as a Partner after serving as Head of Group Legal Strategic Initiatives & Operations at Novartis International. “Many of our clients have expressed an urgent need for an industry standard to more effectively manage KM within their organizations and with their external partners.  We are very proud to spearhead this effort to respond to that need and there is no one better than Corinna to do it,” said Rajitha Boer, Founder of Yerra Solutions.  The new code set will be a primary topic of discussion at the Yerra Solutions Annual Conference in London on 23-24 October.  Read the agenda for the GC Conference.