Who owns the digital workplace?

Ownership in a Big Law digital workplace is not a single-team decision. It is a layered model. Here is how it works and who does what.

Across nearly every Big Law firm we work with, ownership follows the same pattern. IT owns the infrastructure. Knowledge Management owns the experience. Practice groups own their content. Compliance owns the guardrails. The model holds because each group operates within a clearly defined domain, without needing to negotiate every decision with the others.

The complexity starts where the layers overlap. A small number of objects, the attorney directory most prominently, draw on data and decisions from multiple teams simultaneously. These shared objects are where ownership disputes concentrate, where launches stall, and where governance needs the most deliberate design. Knowing where clean ownership ends and shared ownership begins is the difference between a digital workplace that sustains itself and one that quietly degrades.