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Building a knowledge base from scratch is easier said than done for small immigration teams. Even the most well-intentioned leaders I talk to often find big-picture knowledge management tasks near the bottom of their to-do lists.
For one, keeping up with a constant flood of updates—USCIS policy changes, new SOC codes from the DOL, updated country conditions reports—makes it tough to maintain even a small set of templates and SOPs for an immigration team. Add in the operational nuances of your business, like your client onboarding process or digital security policies, and you have a LOT of content to manage.
The best place to start, in my experience? Define the end users of each group of resources (whether that’s employees, clients, etc.), and build structure from there.
Some keys to developing a modern knowledge base:
Employees and clients have a range of learning styles, making it helpful to provide resources that account for these different preferences and needs. Tools like Loom make it easy to record quick ‘how-to’ screen-share videos. For visual mapping, there are plenty of great options for small legal teams—like Visio, Lucidchart, or even Canva.
Where might your employee training materials or client onboarding templates benefit from additional video/audio content, or a screenshot guide? Recycling existing content into different formats can be a great way to improve accessibility AND get more value from your firm’s existing knowledge.
Along with having a basic organizational framework to work with, employees benefit from using a standard naming convention and document formatting expectations when creating, editing, and searching for team resources.
If you’ve ever heard an employee say “Wow, I didn’t know we had this” when discovering a legal template or client resource hidden away in Sharepoint, it might be time to consider how your knowledge is currently organized.
Beyond the text of the document, a template includes the business processes, technology, and organizational systems in which it’s used. With this mind, it’s helpful to consider the data required to complete it and the manner in which it’s located, downloaded, edited, etc.
From my view (as a non-attorney legal professional), the way a user acts on and uses this knowledge is just as important as the legal content itself.
While just a few examples, these are common areas where you can get more value from your existing knowledge content by investing in the digital workflows and editorial processes in which they’ll be used and maintained. When done right, this early investment into these resources will pay off as you scale your operations—giving structure to help manage the constant evolution of your team's collective knowledge.
Where else can small legal teams look for small structural and operational improvements to their knowledge sharing?