Success = Information + Understanding

Jen Mendez, Director of Knowledge Management Innovation, New Jersey

I really enjoy helping foster a culture of knowledge sharing.

Half of my career has been in legal knowledge management. I took the LSATs, got into law school, but before that I started working in a law library. I ended up becoming a law librarian instead, working at a few large firms and always taking on a “little bit more.” I found that I really enjoyed helping people locate the information they needed and organizing data to make it findable. My mentor convinced me to pursue KM.

When we make our lawyers’ collective knowledge accessible, I feel we’re unstoppable.

It’s likely that our attorneys have previously confronted a topic a client is asking about. My job involves relying on people, process, and technology to help us get the right information to the right people at the right time. We want to improve efficiency, mitigate risk, reduce duplicative efforts, and ensure consistent, high quality work product to better service our clients.

My favorite projects here? There are too many to choose from, but the COVID-19 Employment Litigation Tracker and our partnership with Thomson Reuters and LegalMation are the first two that come to mind.

The support I got for the Litigation Tracker was just astounding. I was new to Fisher Phillips and had this idea. My boss loved it, we pretty much immediately took it to the Management Committee and launched it all within two weeks! It was a great opportunity to collaborate with people from different departments throughout the firm, including IT and Marketing. Lots of companies and member organizations have asked to link to the Tracker to show how COVID-19 is impacting their industry. And we’re still regularly getting inquiries.

Our work with Thomson Reuters and LegalMation helps us dig deeper into our data and figure out how long it takes us to handle not just a discrimination matter, but an age discrimination matter, for example. And we can narrow that down to see the effect of a plaintiff in a certain age range. You can change lots of factors and see how it affects the duration of the matter, the settlement amount, everything. Being able to tell our clients what we should do or expect from a budgeting perspective is incredibly insightful. We want to go further and see what happens when we take things to trial, on different motions, and things like that.

KM is perfect for you if you’re open to having all your own information out there.

It’s all about fostering a culture of knowledge sharing. We think of ourselves as “IT light”; there’s a definite tech component. Good project management skills are important, too, because we take on so much. And usability. “Just because you build it does not mean they will come.” We have to make things usable and intuitive. Busy professionals don’ want to have to learn a new system – they want something that works like their iPhone.

People share a genuine joy for being here.

Everyone who I spoke to during interview process and afterwards always conveyed the same message: “Fisher Phillips is a great firm to work for.” And the spirit of collaboration I heard among the firm’s leaders – the way they all talked about each other, that sense of camaraderie, I think that’s really hard to come by, especially at larger firms.

Keeping my 9-year-old and 5-year-old busy with remote schooling has been a handful, but we’re making it work.

And I’m looking forward to bowling again, as that’s popular in my family. My high score is 267. It’s a good number but it’s so disappointing. I had the first seven strikes, and then just completely lost the ball… nine spare, eight spare, and then the last three strikes!

“If a man has not found something worth dying for, he is not fit to live."-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

That’s one of my favorite quotes of all time. It has nothing to do with legal or work, but it has to do with everything.