by Max Marbut
Staff Writer
Any time a CEO, senior partner or any executive grants an interview and is asked, “What’s your greatest asset? What’s the thing that most makes your firm successful?” the answer usually comes down to words to the effect that it’s “our people.”
That’s a good answer, but the fact is it goes a little deeper than that. It’s not the people so much as something those people possess.
“It’s what they know and who they know. It’s what they’ve done,” said attorney Valerie Chritton, Holland & Knight’s director of Knowledge Management.
After graduating from Duke University, Chritton began her career as an accountant and then a CPA with Arthur Young & Company in the Atlanta and New York City offices before earning her J.D. at Columbia University School of Law. Before joining Holland & Knight in 1991, she practiced in the corporate and securities area with an emphasis on accounting issues. Prior to entering private practice, she was also an assistant district attorney with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.
Ten years ago she took a leave of absence to start a family, and when Chritton decided it was time to return to work at Holland & Knight in 2001, “The firm had grown and was still growing rapidly. There were many different offices and many more attorneys. Each office had its own library and they were all linked but not easy to access,” she said.
Chritton’s experience in transactional law, litigation and accounting gave her a distinct advantage when she was chosen to organize the firm’s inventory of knowledge and documents. New technology had also been developed that could help manage millions of digitized documents and make them available on proprietary networks and the Internet at the right place and the right time when needed.
The key was to connect Holland & Knight’s two dozen locations worldwide and its 1,200 attorneys with more than 13 million documents that have been created in-house.
The software Holland & Knight uses also allows its attorneys to access not only work generated within the firm, but millions of documents in the public domain as well. Information from Securities and Exchange Commission filings by public companies from the Fortune 500 to even small caps is categorized and cataloged and able to be searched and accessed based on relevance to a specific case or question. Millions of other documents associated with transactions and mergers, leases and license agreements and even legal and expert opinions are also available to be searched and sorted according to their relevance to a specific question or case.
“I know how lawyers work and what they need. You never want to reinvent the wheel in anything – but especially at a law firm,” said Chritton who also said putting a knowledge management system in place, “doesn’t replace what lawyers do, but it makes them more efficient, and that yields better service for our clients. Whether it’s in the courtroom or in the conference room or negotiating with opposing counsel, having more knowledge and managing it better yields better results.”
Chritton doesn’t believe the traditional law library will ever completely be a thing of the past, but advances in technology have changed the practice of law and will continue to do so.
“We’re still a long way from being paperless, but we’re moving in that direction,” she said.