Legal Technology Journal

Cynicism about social software is misplaced – the active participation it encourages could do wonders for your firm. Blogs, blawgs, wikis, RSS, social tagging, social media, social software, trackbacks – tech-speak gone mad? A lot of hyperbole? Or very useful stuff that, if you are not using in your firm at the moment, you should be soon?

Understanding the technology

If you know Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), then you’re bound to know what a wiki is; if you don’t, then pay the site a visit. Certainly, if you work for one of the top ten firms of the Legal Business 100 2006, then you will be able to read the pages about your own firm. You may be surprised at how accurate they are. Look at the history too – most of the top ten law firm pages have been updated within the past couple of months.

Richard Susskind, in the 2006 Society for Computers and Law Lecture (see www.scl.org), made a call to arms to the legal profession to embrace the opportunities provided by wiki technology to develop dynamic and collaboratively maintained legal resources. There are undoubtedly opportunities to use wiki pages as a tool to develop and maintain legal knowledge on a particular topic – either as a purely internal know-how resource or something made available externally, either to a specific community or to all via the internet. But there are operational possibilities for wikis too – A&O has found them to be extremely useful tools for project and event management, for conducting surveys and producing reports.

As with wikis, the primary media focus on blogs to date has been on their use within the wider internet, with the inevitable concerns about the perils of vanity publishing and the prospect of defamation. But A&O has focused more on the use of blogs within specific internal work communities. The firm has a standard site template, which comprises both a group blog and wiki pages, developed during an initial social software pilot last year, and now used by different work and project teams across the firm. The group blog is at the heart of each site on the home page and provides an opportunity for group members to communicate and share ideas and issues with each other informally and regularly.

Appreciating its distinctiveness

I am sure the cynics among you are now raising your hands to ask – so why is this different from a bulletin board or a normal intranet site? Isn’t it just old ideas with new packaging? If the bulletin boards we piloted a few years ago didn’t catch on at all, and the first wave of enthusiasm for intranet publishing quickly wore off, leaving large swathes of our corporate intranet untended and unvisited for months at a time, why should this be any different?

My response to that is tempered by the fact that I am not a ‘techie’ myself. When, historically, content publishing and communication tools have either not been available or have been too complicated or too inflexible to achieve what I need, I have not been able to go off and build my own website. I have just resorted to e-mail like everyone else. If you are an IT specialist, then perhaps you don’t see such a shift, but my experience is that the ease of use and set-up of blog and wiki technology speaks very powerfully to people who have a desire to communicate, share information or knowledge, or work collaboratively. The standard reaction when people – whether they be staff, clients or competitors – see A&O’s sites is one of immediate understanding and enthusiasm, an appreciation of how this kind of technology can directly benefit their business area and a heartfelt plea: ‘Can I have one too, please?’

Blogs and wikis v the corporate intranet

The blog/wiki-against-traditional-intranet battleground is worth focusing on in more detail. There’s food for thought in the experience of JK Rangaswami at Dresdner Kleinwort, who has seen increasing traffic on the bank’s internal blogs and wikis as opposed to its existing corporate intranet1 . But it need not be a matter of choosing one or the other.

It is valuable to have structured intranet content publishing with the accompanying approval and other governance processes for core firmwide content such as policies and firm information. But blogs and wikis can provide a low-tech, low-cost option for community and project sites that may only be used by certain groups of staff or only be needed on a temporary basis.

And the user experience is different too. Although some of A&O’s community-based blog and wiki sites do have a single owner, they have a much more collaborative feel than the old style of intranet site. Anyone can post a discussion or a comment straight onto the site. Site owners set categories that are used to navigate to archive material, but all members can choose their own ‘themes’ when they post a discussion, so they get a chance to classify content in a way that is meaningful to them, and these themes are also presented as a means of navigation.

This complementary relationship is reflected in the approach of Microsoft and others as they begin to bring social software into the mainstream of content publishing and management via packages such as Sharepoint 2007.

Blogs and wikis v e-mail

The relationship with e-mail merits exploration too. Each of our sites generates a consolidated e-mail alert sent out daily when there are new discussions or comments on the blog or new or amended content on the wiki. And a member posting something on the site can override this and send an immediate alert, for example if their question is urgent. These e-mail alerts are important as they do generate visits to the site from the many reader-only (the buzzword is ‘lurker’) members. So the sites do not get rid of e-mail completely, but using blogs and wikis can reduce its usage and bring other benefits.

For example, I am the site owner of our know-how group site, of which all our professional support lawyers (PSLs) and other know-how staff are members. I have reduced the number of e-mails I send out with news about people, events and projects, and I have deleted a number of e-mail distribution groups. But I communicate more. Items of staff news etc, which I would have hesitated to have disturbed people with an e-mail about, seem more appropriate and less intrusive on the blog. Furthermore, it’s no longer down to me as a central co-ordinator to be the sole newshound: people now post their own news about their colleagues and themselves.

The use of blogs can also foster more timely and interactive communication. E-mail lends itself to the historic impersonal record, for example: ‘I attach the minutes of the meeting last month. Any comments to…’ But meeting and team management can be very different on a blog. There can be advance warning: ‘Quick reminder – team meeting is at 10 on Friday. At the moment we have x and y on the agenda but post a comment if there are items to add.’ If John only reads that on Thursday, he can see if anyone has already posted additional agenda ideas before he posts his own comments and be free of the constant e-mail quandary – reply to sender or cc to all? Then, when Janet, who is on holiday, gets back on Monday, she won’t have 25 irrelevant e-mails in her inbox, but, with a bit of luck, on her return the e-mail alert from the site will have a quick post about the main points that arose from the meeting so she will know what she missed.

E-mail is often used for specific knowledge management purposes and here too blogs and wikis have value to add. At A&O, some of the practice area know-how teams support their fee-earners via an e-mail enquiry line. They are now beginning to use the relevant blog and wiki sites instead, with significant cultural and practical implications. There is a great difference between sending an e-mail to a defined group of PSLs and getting a single response back that probably only you see, and posting a query on the blog visible to the wider team and therefore open to both PSL and fee-earning lawyers to respond to. Similarly, there is a difference between sending out a department-wide e-mail that generates ten ‘cc to all’ replies, all of which say the same thing, and posting something on the blog that shows, as you go to make a response, all the comments that people have made to date within a single, easy-to-read comments space. The sites should engender a willingness among all fee-earners to share expertise and experience, and reduce the burden of queries dealt with solely by the PSLs. Also, the PSLs do not have to take any steps to capture, condense and republish know-how contained in a lengthy e-mail chain – the material is already there on the site and in a format that is much easier to read than e-mail.

Recognising the cultural opportunities and implications

As I have begun to illustrate, social software depends on social behaviours. Social software enables communication and collaboration, but it cannot make them happen, so it may not be appropriate for every organisation. A&O has a deserved reputation as a collegiate partnership and I am sure that this is one of the reasons why it has been able to embrace this new technology so successfully. The firm also has experience of introducing new technologies ahead of the field and probably as a result of that people have been very willing to experiment.

When A&O began its initial social software exploration, it looked to the experience of other businesses in other sectors to shape its thinking. The firm was particularly influenced by the work of Euan Semple at the BBC. There, Euan had made sites widely available for people to use for work, organisational and social networks. But even in that naturally creative, collaborative environment, he had to spend time supporting and nurturing the BBC sites as they got started.

A&O tailored its approach to the initial pilot and wider roll-out to reflect the cultural as well as system implications of introducing social software to the firm. In particular, I know that my fellow lawyers can sometimes be reticent to commit themselves to print and share what they know until they are completely sure of the position, and that lawyers have a reputation for being relatively formal and cautious in their communications. So the initial experimentation was focused on global groups with a high degree of connectivity, with a supportive approach taken during site set-up and launch to try to maximise the chances of success. This was due to a recognition that the most powerful way of showing other groups in A&O the benefits of using social software, without them either getting bogged down in the jargon or taking fright at the lack of detailed terms and conditions of use on the sites, was to show and explain the experience of the firm’s pilot groups.

This hands-on approach to site development and management continues. There is a detailed application form to be completed for new sites. The purpose of this is not only to get people to specify a site name, membership numbers, etc, but also to ensure they think carefully to ensure a site is likely to be right for them and their objectives. The form also sets out the knowledge and development team’s thoughts on blog and wiki best practice – in terms of minimum number of members, the roles of the site owner and administrators, launch and training, and monitoring and measuring success. Additionally, it asks the applicant to set out their objectives for the site and how it is intended to relate to existing systems and communication channels they might use such as e-mail groups, intranet sites and departmental meetings. They are then shown how to communicate most effectively via the blog, highlighting the opportunities and challenges of online ‘dialogue’ as well as the importance of authenticity (ie not getting your PA to post for you!). Once sites are launched, support for the site owners continues to be provided, formally by means of a reporting-and-review process, and informally by sharing tips and ideas across the user group. This may seem a bit intensive, but this technology is still relatively new in the corporate (and certainly the legal) sector, and for many people it marks a step beyond their communication comfort zone. Having said that, there has been a pleasantly surprising positive reaction, even from partners (perhaps because they want to be able to tell their children, ‘I blog too!’). Now seems to be the right time for social software, certainly within A&O, where there is a desire to embrace a more open and collaborative approach at all levels of management, and reflect that in the firm’s internal interactions and communications.

Getting on with it!

If you are not yet using social software within your business, then I hope this article has convinced you to make a start. If you would like to know more about A&O’s experience, then please do contact me at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it My five key recommendations for setting up a social software system are:

• Base your pilot on an application or area that is at the heart of your business strategy – blogs and wikis have hundreds of potential applications for internal and external communications and collaboration, and the best showcase will be a site that successfully meets current business objectives.
• Choose a pilot that has a high likelihood of success so that you can use it to show others. Couple it with an enthusiastic and committed pilot group keen to be effective ‘storytellers’.
• Select your software with care to meet the particular application – ease of set-up and use must be the most important factor.
• Be aware of the cultural dimension to social software, and educate and support your pilot group accordingly.
• Build in monitoring processes, but be flexible about success criteria, which will need to reflect the particular use you are making of the software. In A&O’s experience, a single set of criteria, such as ratio number of people posting to size of membership, will not work.₂

But don’t take my word for it – give it a go! 

Ruth Ward is head of knowledge systems and development at Allen & Overy LLP.