Looking at this question from a marketing perspective, I would say that any law firm larger than about 10 lawyers would have to be either A) high on crack, or B) wedded to an outmoded, 19th century business model in order to miss seeing the ongoing efficiency, productivity and revenue benefits of a well managed KM system — even in the complete absence of client remuneration thereof. I’ll go with answer "B," Regis. Final answer.
First of all, lets look at the fact that most law firms already spend an absolutely insane amount of time cataloging what they do; we call it 1/10 hour incremental billing. In many firms the billing process tags each 6 minute interval by lawyer, client, matter, type of work done and a short description. For junior lawyers, this work is often checked and approved by the "billing attorney." So here’s this fantastically complicated system that is used to do one thing; push bills through a hose. Do they use it to analyze optimum billing phrases for collections percentages? Does anyone in the legal universe even know what I’m talking about? Do they analyze time-to-bill vs. receipts? Nope. Generally not. They just do all that work — which is very, very close to being taxonomy — to get the bills out.
If firms spent about 10% more time coding their bills, they could reap HUGE benefits in terms of KM. If they tagged each billing increment with a related document code; with taxonomy related to the level of difficulty of the work; with a uniform code for the type of work done (contract negotiation, deposition, etc.) instead of using weird shorthand… all these things could be used for dozens of marketing purposes.
I explored this topic a bit more fully in an article I wrote for the American Lawyer Media’s Law Journal Newsletter titled, "The billable hour: if you’re gonna use it.. use it!" As I say in the article, to go to all the trouble of billing and then not reap some KM rewards… it’s like spending $4,000 on an African Grey parrot, training it for two years to engage in complex conversation… and then eating it.
Stumble it!