Inter-Organizational Knowledge Management: A Comparison of Law Firms in Norway and Australia

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 organizations in the future. This paper reports results from a survey of Norwegian law firms on the use of information technology to support inter-organizational knowledge management. Two predictors of IT support were significant: firm cooperation and knowledge cooperation. Interorganizational 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.