Law Practice Today

For every legal blogger who has won a wide audience, there are dozens more who never developed a following. For all the Twitterers who use their updates to build a personal brand, there are a plethora who end up with few followers beyond immediate friends and family. While certainly blogs and Twitter can be effective ways to put Web 2.0 tools to use in a lawyer’s practice, they are both essentially media plays—to be successful, you need to build a substantial external audience, a task that grows increasingly difficult as these media mature. But there is one Web 2.0 technology that can benefit nearly any practice without requiring media attention, or even an external audience—and that technology is the wiki.

When most people hear the term, "wiki," they instantly think of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia where a universe of contributors are continually collaborating to add or update the wealth of information on the site. There's no doubt that Wikipedia is a fantastic source of information for public consumption. But do you know that wiki collaboration can be used for more than public knowledge bases such as Wikipedia? It can also be applied to specific legal tasks within the privacy of the firm’s computer network, in ways that extend from capturing and building up internal knowledge to managing clients’ cases more effectively.

Let’s look at four practical ways to use legal wikis to drive collaboration in the practice of law, all with an eye to the types of benefits that can make any firm more successful in delivering its services.

Building a Knowledge Base within Your Practice

A legal wiki can help build real value by leveraging existing knowledge and maximizing the utility of the attorneys' time through a shared online practice-specific knowledge base. It can especially help partners and senior associates share their expertise with more-junior lawyers and the rest of their teams efficiently. Think of it this way: By placing all appropriate practice information on a firm or practice-area specific wiki rather than sending out ad hoc information requests via team- or practice-wide e-mails (or randomly asking for information in hallway conversations), you can capture, store and refine the legal expertise of your team in one central repository. This kind of internal legal knowledge base is especially effective for litigators, though it also offers benefits to transactional and other practices as well.

Among other types of information, wikis make it easy to capture valuable proprietary knowledge about specific judges, potential opposing counsel, arbitrators and mediators, expert witnesses and other legal issues, parties and resources. You can also collect key citations for legal issues, important jurisdiction information and other helpful know-how in a searchable repository, so that work on each matter doesn't start from scratch each time. Over time, this knowledge base can be a key competitive advantage for your firm.

Managing Individual Cases and Client-Specific Teams

If your firm is like most others, the pertinent information about individual cases is distributed throughout the firm’s document management system, in the e-mail boxes of various lawyers and their staff and, most of all, in the heads of your attorneys. To make all this information readily accessible to the case team members who really need it, you have to find a way to link them together. The solution: Improve the management and coordination of cases with secure, shared workspaces by having a wiki for each case, so users can link to all the relevant case facts, even when they are dispersed in different systems. Your team members can find facts immediately and invest their time more in crafting the ideal pleadings instead of dealing with overflowing e-mail inboxes.

You can also save time and improve efficiency by creating a single place to coordinate each team's efforts—including publishing a directory of case team members, keeping track of team and court calendars, archiving meeting notes, and tracking progress toward your goals within the case wiki. A case management wiki is especially useful for complex and long-running cases, where the team is likely to include attorneys and staff from multiple offices, as well as local or co-counsel lawyers.

Using Wikis as Secure Low-Cost Client Extranets

Using e-mail to collect and exchange documents with your clients is a process that’s slow, unsecure and prone to error. Most attorneys spend far too much of their computer time reading and writing e-mails. A much better way to handle things is to set up a secure, externally accessible legal wiki to collect and review your documents with each client, also allowing you can to minimize errors and slash repetitive e-mail chains. 

How many times have you had a client lose an important document? How many times have you been forced to e-mail the same document over and over? How often has confusion arisen between your attorneys and the client over which version of a document is most current? Online collaboration with the client improves the quality of your interactions with the client as well as the productivity of lawyers and staff. And by providing greater transparency and accountability via a secure extranet for each client matter, you can increase client satisfaction and retention as well.

Sharing Organizational Know-How with a Firmwide Intranet

Your lawyers and staff spend untold hours forwarding and re-sending useful information captured in e-mails. Keeping useful information locked away in e-mail inboxes means users can only search their archives for the answers to questions they've asked before, and there's no easy way to know if answers captured in old e-mails are even still correct. When "crunch time" hits, your staff may be too busy answering repetitive queries (e.g. "How to search for documents using Bates numbering?") to answer the really critical questions.

Instead of relying on tribal knowledge and constant e-mails and hallway conversations or constantly reinventing the wheel, a firmwide wiki can serve as an easy-to-use intranet platform to document and share this organizational know-how. Information to be placed on this wiki ranges from company policies and procedures to the specific nuts and bolts of how to file with your local court system. And unlike traditionally clunky intranet software, wikis are designed for ease of use and to allow everyone in the organization to participate.

Extending Your Use of Web 2.0

Clearly, the ways you can use wikis in your law practice go far beyond simply looking up information in Wikipedia. Wikis can help you organize your knowledge, your workflow, and even your clients and their matters. In doing so, this Web 2.0 technology can deliver numerous practical benefits in terms of increased productivity and greater client satisfaction. And during these tough economic times, saving money and keeping clients happy are more important uses of technology than ever before.