Introduction
Web 2.0 can be described very briefly as a collection of Internet tools that allow users to create and publish digital content just as easily as they can access online content published by other people. This has had an enormous impact on society, culture, and industry, transforming the way in which we communicate and do business.
The legal sector, which can have a reputation for being rather conservative and slow to change, has begun to adapt in order to take advantage of the possibilities offered by Web 2.0 technologies. For example, in 2008 the Australian Capital Territory Supreme Court granted permission to serve legal documents via Facebook (BBC News, 2008), while in 2009 the High Court in England allowed an injunction to be served via Twitter (Johnson, 2009). In 2011 the Lord Chief Justice issued guidance on the use of live text communication by journalists in courts in England and Wales, allowing reporters to use mobile email, social media (such as Twitter) and laptops in court without having to make a previous application to do so (Lord Chief Justice, 2011).
A number of law firms, like many other commercial businesses, have attempted to harness the social media element of Web 2.0 as a marketing tool, launching blogs about law and legal practice (referred to as “blawgs” – Holmes, 2011) and creating Twitter accounts (this has seen varying degrees of success – a report by web consultancy Intendance found that while 66% of the top 50 UK law firms had created at least one account on Twitter, 19 of those accounts had tweeted nothing at all, running the risk of damaging the firms’ reputations by creating an image of laziness. Rothwell, 2011).
However, the use of Web 2.0 tools for marketing and business development purposes is very much customer or client facing. How are these technologies being used within law firms to publish and share information in ways that are accessible and effective? How are information professionals in the legal sector using these technologies to perform their tasks more efficiently? What innovative methods and tools does Web 2.0 offer for representing and organising digital data? This post will examine these questions, with a focus on law firms in the UK.
Publishing and sharing information in law firms: wikis and blogs
For law firms, like most organisations, the primary form of communication is by email. Communicating via email has a number of advantages, such as speed, security, and the ability to attach digital documents (for example, spreadsheets and photos). However, email also has a number of problems, particularly in regards to distributing and accessing information widely.
For example, emails can limit access to information – anything disclosed in an email is only accessible to whomever it was sent to. What happens if, at a later date, someone in the firm who didn’t receive the original email would benefit from knowing the information? What if they didn’t even know who sent or received the original message? What if they weren’t even aware the information existed at all? Email, then, can be viewed as a closed system (Gould, 2010).
Emails can also lead to a state of information overload, with lawyers becoming snowed under by the number of messages in their inbox, which could lead to crucial updates being missed.
These problems prompt a number of questions. How can firms, particularly large ones, leverage the knowledge of the people in their organisations? How can people in different offices, or even in different countries, share information easily and effectively?
Firms are starting to turn to wikis and blogs as a way of resolving these issues. The open, social nature of these tools allows people to collaborate, share and publish information much more easily and much more widely. For example, important documents that need to be referred to often by a group of people (for example, instructions regarding a particular client) can be turned into blog posts or wikis, enabling them to be updated easily by members of the group, as opposed to the much more involved process of locating the file the document is in, updating the document, and then re-uploading it to the firm’s intranet.
Wikis and blogs also allow people to access and discover information much more easily, regardless of where or how it is stored. Having this information openly available, instead of in an email in someone’s inbox, resolves the issue of people asking for the information to be resent, as well as the issue of people not even knowing the information exists.
An example of a law firm that has successfully implemented the use of wikis and blogs to create a much more open system of publishing and sharing information is Addleshaw Goddard. A particularly interesting element of their system is a plugin that allows the use of tags across the whole blog system. The following quote from Mark Gould, Head of Knowledge Management at the firm, explains how this works:
“As people begin to tag their content, it becomes possible to track activity wherever it appears. So, for example, the BD [Business Development] team might write about an opportunity they are pursuing with a particular company and tag it with the name of the company. At the same time, a post on the PDP [Partner Development Programme] blog might also mention the company and be tagged as well. The tag collection allows readers to click on a tag and read all the blog posts with that tag, so the BD and PDP posts would appear together, even though they exist on separate blogs.” (Gould, 2010, pp.11-12)
The use of wikis and blogs can be seen then to help people within a firm become more aware of the information and expertise available within their organisation – essentially, the firm becomes more self-aware, and as a consequence becomes more efficient.
Information Professionals: current awareness and RSS feeds
One of the most important services provided by information professionals in law firms is what is referred to in the industry as “current awareness” (Edwards, 2009). It is vital for lawyers to be up to date on any developments in their chosen areas of practice, such as amendments to legislation, judgments that set new legal precedents, publication of government and industry reports, announcements by agencies and executives, updates to any cases of interest that are currently in court, and statements by judicial bodies, along with news articles and commentary in legal journals and publications. In law firms the task of monitoring these developments falls to the information professionals employed by the firm. Carrying out this task manually by regularly visiting relevant websites to check for updates and scanning through journals and newspapers would be an incredibly time-consuming and laborious process for a large team, if not outright impossible for a smaller team.
RSS feeds, one of the key elements of Web 2.0, are of enormous benefit for information professionals carrying out current awareness. RSS (“Really Simple Syndication” or “Remote Site Syndication”) is a format which feeds information to a browser, as opposed to a browser pulling information from the web. This means that when a website is updated with new content, the RSS feed for the site delivers that same content (or an excerpt, or a link to it) to the browsers of interested readers. As a consequence, by selecting the RSS feeds of sites and information sources they are interested in, users can create personalized summaries of new content. This benefits users by saving them the time and effort of regularly visiting the sites themselves to see if anything new has been added, and ensures they don’t miss anything important.
Because information is so vital to the legal sector, it comes as no surprise that many online legal information sources provide RSS feeds. For example, Lawtel, one of the leading legal news and research sources on the Internet, provides RSS feeds focusing on practice areas (for example, human rights or personal injury) and particular types of content (such as case law or legislation), while the PLC (Practical Law Company) website, another popular online legal resource, also provides RSS feeds focusing on practice areas (cite – Lawtel and PLC). The BAILII (Britsh and Irish Legal Information Institute) website has RSS feeds for the judgments and decisions of individual courts throughout the U.K. and Ireland.
Monitoring these RSS feeds instead of checking for updates manually allows information professionals to carry out their current awareness tasks much more efficiently and accurately.
Why not publish the RSS feeds in a single place, such as a page on the firm’s intranet? Not every lawyer in a firm will work in the same practice areas, or be following the same cases, or be interested in the same news. Publishing all of the feeds together would still lead to too much information for lawyers to trawl through.
As a consequence it is still necessary for a law firm’s information professionals to monitor RSS feeds, selecting and sending out relevant updates to interested lawyers, or groups of lawyers. In large firms with hundreds of lawyers and many different practice areas this process of monitoring, sorting, collating, and resending information can still take up some time. This leads to the need for ever more innovative methods and tools for organising digital information.
Innovative methods and tools: smart alerts
A number of UK law firms have begun using RSS aggregator services such as Linex (used by Macfarlanes) and Attensa StreamServer (used by Reynolds Porter Chamberlain) to create ‘smart alerts’ (Attensa, 2011; Linex Systems Ltd, 2011). These services bring together the content of RSS feeds along with content from paid subscription sources into a single place, and then automatically create targeted custom alerts for groups and individuals in the firm.
These alerts can be published to intranet pages (such as pages for different divisions in the firm), delivered as personalized emails, or (in the case of StreamServer) delivered to user’s personal web dashboards.
Furthermore, these services also aggregate content generated within the firm, picking up on content added to the firm’s wikis, blogs, and intranet pages. Such services help firms to further capitalize on the investment they have made in social tools such as wikis and blogs, heightening awareness of the knowledge and expertise that exists within the firm.
Conclusion
It can be seen that the use of wikis, blogs, and RSS feeds is allowing law firms to share and distribute information within their organisations much more easily. The same tools also allow information professionals working within law firms to perform their tasks more efficiently. However, with firms starting to introduce social tools and frameworks we are seeing what could be the start of a paradigm shift – a move away from a document-centered view of information to something else.
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