Last year I collaborated on a book about the impact of social tools on enterprises in general and law firms more specifically. It is now available through Gower Publishing, with the rather strange title of Blogging and Other Social Media: Exploiting the Technology and Protecting the Enterprise.

The problem with books about technology innovation, of course, is that they can date very quickly. However, the pace of change in most businesses in 2008 was slower than the printing press, so the recommendations in the book not only still stand, they have become more relevant since then, thanks to the recession.

On Tuesday at Legaltech in New York, I will be joining Mary Abraham to run a session on the impact of Web 2.0 ideas on the legal sector. This is a most interesting time to be having this discussion since major law firms are suffering a fall in revenues that means they need to move more quickly towards a leaner, self-service era, and also to brush up their new business and client retention skills.

There are two ways that IT departments tend to respond to this kind of challenge. The first is to seek to protect everything they already do, try to squeeze suppliers and restrict further investment or innovation. There are often petty bureaucratic reasons for this reflex, as people seek to protect "their" projects or justify previous decisions they have made. The second approach is to grasp the opportunity to re-think their role and how they deliver value to the business and finally ditch the slow, lumbering projects (perhaps an intranet project, a "major" CRM system or an 1990's-style KM repository) that everybody knows is not worth the money, and instead look to radically cheaper ways of achieving the same results. Dion Hinchcliffe has written about this recently. I will be talking more about this at an International Legal Technology Association event in London in March, plus the opportunities afforded by open source software.

In advance of Legaltech, another speaker asked what attendees would offer as their main recommendation for any firm looking into adopting new social technologies. I suppose my only generic recommendation that might apply to most larger firms would be to apply more of an investment mentality to IT and take the opportunity to deliver the coup de grace to expensive white elephant projects that are not well-loved by users, and set IT a challenge to work more closely with the business to deliver new projects more quickly and at lower cost. This also means no more talk of being tied to one vendor or one technology. This lazy approach has no real benefit any more in terms of integration - you can run pretty much anything on pretty much anything else these days, and integration is about different systems talking to each other via APIs and common data formats rather than all sharing the same codebase.

Social computing vs traditional enterprise computing is not a zero sum game. Much of the value of these new tools comes from adding a social layer that can enable users to get more out of existing backend systems. But for as long as IT cling to their untouchable big projects, many of which are leaking time and cash out of the business, they cannot focus on doing things quicker and cheaper using more up-to-date technologies. In 2008, many companies thought little of spending many hundreds of thousands of dollars propping up old systems that also cost their lawyers many wasted billable hours trying to find things, but shied away from giving lawyers simple tools like RSS, presence sharing, blogs and wikis because it was not seen as an area of core focus. I suspect in 2009, there will be a lot more pressure to better serve the needs of the business and do anything that can demonstrate that it saves time and money or helps win and retain new business.

Legal business has always been social, and it has always been about networking and demonstrating intelligence and insight. That doesn't sound like silo-based document management to me! Lawyers are on whole pretty smart cookies, and I am often shocked at the way Legal IT people make sweeping assumptions about what they 'will not do'. It is clear by now that individuals inside law firms have embraced social networking, blogging and online collaboration outside the firewall, so perhaps it is time to give them a chance to do this in a more secure business setting, inside the firewall.

I am very much looking forward to learning more about how legal IT people plan to bring forward this change over the next few days at Legaltech.