Transforming the current awareness process

Current awareness is immensely important to any legal firm. But pushing out weekly or monthly bulletins makes it difficult to be reactive and stay current in the between-times. This can result in publications containing information that is out-of-date or of little interest or value. RSS and blogs offer exciting ways to revamp the current awareness process:

• RSS feeds can be customised to deliver information tailored to the practice area, or feed preferences determined by the individual, and displayed within his or her personal space. They also curb email bombardment, giving people the ability to scan the information quickly, signal whether it has been read, rate or comment on it.
• Blogs replace the time-consuming process of compiling its weekly newsletters, so that information can be easily added, categorised and published at any time. This process moves away from monthly publication cycles and keeps the information flowing all the time. Importantly, it also enables readers to give immediate feedback and ask questions about content items.

Expertise location

Traditionally, firms have used expertise directories as a way of overcoming the 'know who is doing what' issue. But trying to populate and update corporate "yellow pages" with everyone's resumé in a way that truly reflects their expertise is largely impossible.  Not only does that require identification of what information might be useful to people in the future, it also places a burden on people to fill in their profile information and keep it up-to-date. Social tools are an extremely effective replacement for static expertise directories: 

• Standard personal profile information is constantly and dynamically updated by the user's activity in the system, making his or her experience more visible and accessible. 
• Seekers find people they need not just via rich profiles, but also through comments or discussions, or items they bookmark and tag.

Making conversations the heart of knowledge sharing

Knowledge management initiatives structured around document and email-centric models do little to help people quickly and easily share their experiences and are bad at letting others across the firm know what people are thinking. Instead, we need to make conversations, and not just documents, the central element of internal knowledge sharing:

• Blogs allow people to record their observations, opinions and comments, and to make connections to what other people are saying or reading.
• Project or client-intelligence blogs provide a narrative of a project's history or work undertaken with a client, and enable new team members to get up to speed quickly. Interest-group focused blogs can have multiple contributors and clearly defined business objectives that encourage the reporting of news items and issues as soon as they arise.
• Wikis can also be a key knowledge sharing tool, being used to create informal FAQ resources, and more structured know-how resources (e.g. a section-by-section guide to a piece of legislation).

Improving information findability

Most legal professionals are overloaded with information, and spend hours sifting through irrelevant content trying to find the latest version of a document or an email with the revised instructions. Not only does this make people less productive, they may also be prone to make bad or ill-timed decisions and be unable to maintain desired standards of quality. For instance, if information is needed on a precedent agreement in a particular practice area and/or jurisdiction:

• People can post a question about the issue on the shared blog of the relevant legal group;
• Other members of that group will then receive an alert of the entry via e-mail.
• Members can post answers to the group blog and bookmark relevant information as they need it.
• Shared links relevant to the issue can also be created, and thematic labels ('tags') can be applied to the blog post and wiki page.

Internal communications

Good communication at all levels is vital for law firms of all sizes. However, internal communications are usually executed through centralised and often complex processes involving the compilation of newsletters and the updating of static intranet pages. Social tools offer a simple and flexible alternative here, and can be very appealing to those who find the formal internal communications and publishing platforms difficult and time-consuming to use:

• Internal blogging allows people to communicate their expertise related to a sector, industry or technology, and makes it easier to reach people in different geographical regions or practice areas.
• Management blogs can offer a fresh approach to the way management news is relayed - more of a regular and ongoing conversation, rather than a press release.

Value-added client extranets

Firms can cater to clients' requests for greater and more tailored access to the firm's information and know-how by setting up secure spaces to engage with their clients. Many of the expensive extranet initiatives that sprung up some years ago (such as deal rooms) can now be created more cheaply and effectively using Web 2.0 technology:

• Wiki spaces can offer regular updates regarding the status of a transaction or project, collate associated documents, meeting notes, risks and associated news or other information.
• Blogs can be used to push out tailored snippets of information to clients in real time, making it more digestible, current and valuable. 
• Clients can also signal their interest in particular areas rather than receiving a blanket range of information, and strip away time-wasting excess as a result. 

Feeding business intelligence into the CRM

Group weblogs and 'Twitter-like' micro-messaging are excellent "sense-making networks" for discussion between individuals who share common interests or practice. They can be used to:

• Feed CRM systems where internal discussions regarding client intelligence and current awareness is coupled with client contact information;
• Tie together people's activities and outputs, along with links to news and other items regarding the clients/projects;
• Enable people to signal to co-workers what they are working on, easily raise and respond to a variety of rapid-fire questions, discuss ideas, and share links and information. 

Personlised information flows

As content continues to proliferate it becomes increasingly difficult for people to manage their attention and have need-to-know information at their finger tips. The personalisation of information presentation via personal start pages will be critical in helping people simplify their access to information and expertise.

• Personal start pages allow each person to decide what and who she or he monitors, and to aggregate in one place all information from various systems including: workspaces, internal communication and project management systems, know-how and CRM databases, and third party sources.
• People can subscribe to recent changes made to all pages or spaces with certain tags (e.g. client name or topic area) as well as information coming in from external social networks, news and information feeds, allowing them to monitor legal developments, business opportunities, work progress and more.

Streamlining new matter in-take

New matter intake can be a time-consuming, complicated process for firms. Whilst some firms have endeavoured to automate this process, many rely on e-mails and the knowledge of a few to identify pertinent information that need to be placed in to the hands of a conflicts manager, committee or other parties for review and approval.  These processes can be precarious, if the information being relied on is incomplete or unreliable.  Worse, people will have little or no visibility so as to be able to rectify the situation:

• Micro-messaging is also an excellent tool for keeping people informed of the matters they are working on and for rapidly raising flags about potential conflicts and issues when that information is circulated.
• 'Profiles' can be linked to the matters people are working on, and be updated with the status and recent activities in respect of the matter;
• By circulating new matter information across the firm in a blog or a recent update to a wiki page, more people can be reached more effectively and an audit trail can be created to prove that all necessary checks have been performed.

Collaborative document drafting

People need easy and accessible ways to work together with this information to turn it into actionable insight. Wikis are ideally suited for this role, and are now widely used for document writing, the creation of knowledge repositories and glossaries, idea generation/brainstorming, and project-based collaboration.

• Wikis make it easy for people in different locations to come together, create and comment on their content items simultaneously, make revisions, then aggregate and publish the output in word, .pdf or other format.
• Every page is automatically stamped with the name of the original author, the latest editor, and what s/he changed.  Changes can be reversed at any time, by rolling back to a previous version;
• This alleviate the time-consuming and cumbersome process of emailing document attachments, and makes more transparent the currency of information and its authorship.

Wikis: a narrative-based guide

A wiki can also act as an excellent narrative-based guide that links out to content in various repositories:

• It is an excellent means for users to enrich information about precedents (or other documents);
• It can include additional detail such as when the information was created, who reviewed or approved it, who else might be interested in the information or has similar knowledge, when the information has been applied and proved useful, what other sources of information are closely related or interchangeable.

Project management and monitoring progress

Activity streams allow people to track work on a project, such as the latest amendments to or comments on documentation (in the wiki page), amendments to project pages, and latest news regarding the client posted on the blog. 

• All these activities along with quick questions about 'where to find' or 'how to do' something can be channelled into a single stream of information and delivered to people's personal dashboard.
• Even something as simple as using a wiki page for online meeting agendas and subsequent meeting minutes writing up can cut down on email traffic and save time.

Supplementing top-down categorisation with social tagging

Top-down classification is a quick and easy way to narrow down the scope of search or find to a clearly identifiable, non-contentious category, such as a client, practice area, office or internal department. Once we have delivered a user to broadly the right domain of information, social tagging should then be used to:

• Present users with the most popular, most recent or most relevant terms that other people have used within that domain;
• Provide a feedback loop between actual usage and future findability, which improves over time as more people tag content to help them find it again later.

Knitting together existing systems

Some of the best use cases for social tools are their use as a social interaction layer. They can:

• Join together and mediate access to back-end systems on behalf of individuals who need the information they contain, but perhaps do not want to have to deep dive into a variety of different systems to get it.
• Bring back to life older systems that people tend to avoid by providing an easy or engaging user experience.