Inter-organisational knowledge management: A comparison of law firms in Norway and Australia

Abstract: Law firms represent an industry that seems very well suited to knowledge management investigation. Law firms are knowledge intensive, and the use of advanced technology may well transform these organisations in the future. This paper reports results from a survey of Norwegian law firms on the use of information technology to support inter-organisational knowledge management. Two predictors of IT support were significant: firm cooperation and knowledge cooperation. Interorganisational trust was not a significant predictor. An identical survey was conducted in Australia where knowledge cooperation turned out to be the only significant predictor of IT support. Both in Norway and Australia, mainly software and systems such as word processing, electronic mail and legal databases were used. Australian law firms seem to use IT to a larger extent than Norwegian law firms, especially electronic mail, presentations, other law firms' web pages on the Internet, library system, law firm's own Intranet, document systems, and other law firms' web pages on extranets.

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