Among emerging technology in the legal field, improving knowledge management is the key goal. For many firms, knowledge management involves combining the primary components — people, processes, and technology—with the ability to memorialize, save, and retrieve pertinent information in order to create explicit knowledge that can be easily sorted and accessed for future use.

In the past, large firms had the upper hand because knowledge was externalized via ever-changing and expensive sources including reporters, treatises, and statutes. An abundance of both human and financial resources were needed to keep pace with those evolving and highly material sources.

Computers and the Internet arrived and drastically closed the knowledge gap. Still, larger firms maintained an advantage regarding the retention and retrieval of explicit information: their paralegals could be used exclusively to save the firms’ most used case law, create templates from memoranda of law and other legal documents, and update databases constantly with procedures memos, expert opinions, etc. Every small firm attorney has no doubt questioned how a big firm churned out a memorandum of law in a few days with a seemingly endless table of authorities; considering the availability of these databases to big firm attorneys, the briefs are less surprising.

Now, however, an expanding list of affordable technology tools has bridged the gap between larger and smaller firms’ productivity. Newer word processing systems now include legal document templates and tools that check key cites for all the documents’ cited cases, decreasing a large firms’ technology advantage. Moreover, user-friendly case law websites and desktop searches allow smaller firms the ability to easily assemble their own in-house information catalogues. This emerging technology — combined with an intelligent implementation of IT — can allow a small, sophisticated law firm to litigate as effectively as one with hundreds of attorneys while ensuring that clients avoid the financial burden associated with big firms.