| Abstract: | A law firm can be understood as a social community specializing in the speed and efficiency of creating and transferring legal knowledge. Knowledge management was first introduced to law firms in order to help them create, share and apply knowledge more effectively: information technology (IT) might well play an important role in the success of such knowledge management initiatives. In this paper, IT support for knowledge management is linked to stages of growth, with a stages‐of‐growth model proposed that consists of four stages. The first stage addresses the end‐user tools made available to knowledge workers (people to technology), while the second involves information about who knows what (people to people). The third stage concerns the information held by knowledge workers (people to documents), with information systems actually solving knowledge problems constituting the fourth and final stage (people to systems). Stages‐of‐growth models have been widely used in both organizational research and IT management research: such models have also been criticized for their lack of empirical validity. This paper develops such a survey instrument in order to test a knowledge management technology stage model empirically. |
