For legal firms at the leading edge of meeting today’s exacting demands, ‘knowledge’ now involves a multitude of practical applications, many driven by the advances in technology — especially AI — and how these are shaping the future of the profession.

Helen O’Connor, a former practising barrister, was appointed international director of knowledge and insight earlier this year at DLA Piper and, based in Dublin, has helped to raise the profile of its knowledge function in Ireland in more than 40 countries across the Americas, Asia Pacific, Australasia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

“Occasionally I tell people that I am the curator of the firm’s collective wisdom,” she laughs. Which more prosaically, if as importantly, means leading her large team across various jurisdictions to enable DLA Piper — which focuses on commercial law — to capture, organise and apply its combined expertise and enable its lawyers to work more efficiently, deliver top quality advice and maintain a competitive edge.

In her role as director of knowledge, she has developed a strategic framework that’s aligned both with local priorities and DLA Piper’s global aspiration to prioritise high-impact, market-driven knowledge outputs.

Joining the firm in 2022, she has led on significant cross-border initiatives, including sitting on the firm’s international learning council, ESG steering committee, and the engagement and incentives working group. Her leadership, extending into legal tech, plays a key role in the procurement and design of AI tools and in-house use cases.

“Knowledge functions have become a major feature of big law firms, but with DLA Piper being relatively new to Dublin, it was somewhat unusual to prioritise that function as quickly as they did,” she says.

“When I went in to set it up, I found the DLA Piper approach to knowledge is very market-led. We see the whole thing as being the creation of culture of sharing wisdom and expertise, rather than a team of people whose job it is to just sit in their own space and produce precedents and practice notes.”

The job of the knowledge professionals, she adds, is to create a knowledge base from legal research, thinking and reasoning and to deliver that in a way that’s reusable, accessible, lowers risk and drives efficiencies.

“That was a new, exciting model, and I was engaged in that for two-and-a-half years until the job of leading the international team became available and I decided to go for that,” she explains.

“I remember saying to someone at the time that I was approaching it as if I was one-nil down at half time, and the interview process was very extensive, but I decided to be very unabashedly myself — and that included having strong opinions about how things could be done better.”

She was fortunate, she says, that while DLA Piper is an international firm, it has a large London presence and while she was conversant with the way markets operated in common law countries, she could understand and speak that language while doing so from a perspective that was not purely London-centric.

“Because the firm had only opened its Irish office in 2019, everyone coming in was open to change and leaving something behind — so it was a fresh start for us all.”

In 2021, the firm moved to a new 30,000 square foot office in Dublin’s Molesworth Street, just north of St Stephen’s Green, which, spread over six floors to accommodate an increased headcount, encapsulates that ‘fresh start’ approach.

“There’s a real appetite to do things differently and to change old processes where they don’t work, or where the only reason you continue them is because you always have. Everyone was quite primed and ready for that,” she says.

Prior to joining DLA Piper, Ms O’Connor’s career had been full and varied. Her academic and professional qualifications include a BA in History and Politics from Trinity College Dublin, an LLM from University College Cork, and a barrister-at-law degree from the King’s Inns, where she ranked fourth in her class out of 180.

She has practised in complex commercial litigation and lectured in law at UCC and Université Paris Ouest (Paris Nanterre University).

“I was a barrister for 13 years and during the last 10 of those was also lecturing at UCC, so at the time I hadn’t even heard of a knowledge lawyer or a professional support lawyer,” she recalls, adding that the most pivotal decision she has made in her career was to leave self-employment as a barrister.

As in many other areas, AI has made the role of the knowledge team fundamental. “AI engines have become incredibly exciting but they only work with fuel,” she explains. And the fuel that you feed to an AI engine must be of the highest quality — otherwise, it’s rubbish in, rubbish out.

“So, I can ask the AI engine for a green lease for the retail sector in Dublin, Sheffield and Paris, for example. And with the resulting bank of documents that are cleansed, curated and tagged we’re now supercharged and way ahead of where we were previously,” she says.

“And that document, when stripped back, might be the starting point for the next version for someone else or might reveal something new that we can use for internal training for our junior lawyers, lawyers and partners. It might also be useful for client training, allowing people in a particular sector know where the market is going.

“Essentially, it gives us early indications about what’s happening, tracking trends, keeping everyone informed and adding value to what we do.”

The people who report to her in some manner include country heads of knowledge in significant jurisdictions, group heads of knowledge for each of seven practice groups who will be subject matter experts, and the people in a matrix working for those experts.

While Ms O’Connor describes herself as “very social”, working with a cohort of that size is something of a challenge. “I’m not going to guarantee that I know when and where everyone is going on holiday — but I do OK,” she smiles.

By its nature, the post involves a lot of travel to locations such as London, Amsterdam and Luxembourg. “Every jurisdiction has its own peculiarities, its own sensitivities and strategic imperatives that we must ensure we’re serving all the time.”

This sounds like a daunting proposition, but it’s one that Ms O’Connor clearly relishes. “We’re working on big commercial matters for enormous international organisations, or in Ireland, national organisations.

“The ways in which you advise those entities to engage with consumers, regulators and each other change the world on a daily basis. And if you do that carefully and well, you are moving the needle on making things better for many people most of the time,” she says.

Whenever temporarily relieved of these demanding responsibilities, there is some time to unwind with what she engagingly describes as a rugby-coaching husband, an elderly Shih Tzu, a “slightly psychotic” cat and an addiction to the New York Times.

Otherwise, as Cardinal Newman observed in his scholastic ambitions for Ireland: “Knowledge is its own end” — and it’s clearly a rewarding one for Ms O’Connor.