You and I call it "knowledge management" (KM). DuPont called it "convergence" when, in the early 1990's, its legal department launched an initiative to reduce the number of external law firms, streamline the management of more than 4,000 legal cases, and meet the challenges of global competition. The formalization of the outcome, called the DuPont Legal Model, has all the classic earmarks of KM — electronic document retrieval, knowledge stewards, collaboration, culture change, learning, and leveraging expert know-how. But it also has four attributes we don't automatically associate with KM — significant cost savings, selectivity, promotion, and revenue generation.

The DuPont Legal Model illustrates a trend away from implementing large enterprise document repositories and managing content for its own sake toward improving productivity and extracting business value from specific work processes. The challenge is not so much finding a needle in an information haystack as it is distilling and publicizing information gleaned from multiple collaborative work spaces. In this article, we look at the model's origins, how it works, its results, and the implications for knowledge base publishers.

Origins
In 1992, DuPont's then-chairman Edgar Woolard, Jr. challenged his managers to come up with $1 billion in savings to position the company to compete more effectively in the global marketplace. At about this time, DuPont's legal department was experiencing a dramatic rise in litigation. Jury demographics were changing too, with a greater proportion of women and minorities. And the administrative overhead involved in dealing with more than 300 external law firms had become an unsustainable burden.

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