Why most law firms' internal collaboration systems are doomed to fail

When I speak at events in the US, I usually find that the people in the first few rows of the hall - or at the sides, it all depends on where the electrical outlets are - are poised with their laptops or tablets to live tweet or blog the talk, #hashtags at the ready. But at a recent knowledge management conference in London, WiFi wasn't even offered.

As a part of my remarks in London (I joined Ruth Ward of Allen & Overy to speak on knowledge portals and search), I asked the attendees about their social media habits. Almost everyone there used Wikipedia content, but only one had ever contributed or edited a value in Wikipedia. Most read blogs or looked through Facebook or Twitter during the course of the average day, but only one had posted to any social media outlet that day.

While the cultural differences between social media usage in the US and the UK may be clear, at least in the realm of that conference, I don't believe any such 'across the pond' difference exists when it comes to internal collaboration. The reason here is not culture, but utility. If a post has the potential to reach millions in the public world, within a firm the audience is limited.

What does social media adoption mean within a law firm? Because of its relatively small scale, I believe that most online collaborative alternatives to email that rely on user contributions are doomed to fail due to their limited return on investment.

Chicken and egg

Yes, you will do your job and create a master form to be used by only the few lawyers in your practice, but you are not likely to post about it in your internal social outlets for two main reasons:

1. Your readers are busy, and you're aware of that. Unless your internal channels are the only way people receive information, they are unlikely to rely on it. And, because of economies of scale, you are unlikely to be able to produce everything they need through those channels.

2. Your readers' social adoption standards are varied. You don't know if they monitor the social outlets, so you still have to email them to make sure they know about it.

It's the classic chicken and egg scenario: they only check the places they know the information will be, and you only place the information in places you're sure they will check.

Attention management

A decade ago, people didn't have access to much information. Any post served two purposes:

1. giving the audience access to the information; and

2. alerting them to its existence.

Today, we have access to too much information and our challenge is to focus our attention. Having yet another place to monitor for developments won't necessarily help.

A semi-social, semi-automated solution

So what will work? Imagine a 'Facebook for law firms', where the system provides a feed of relevant activity related to the matters you work on and the topics you follow. You have a permanent reason to come back and check for updates, consistently. While there, you may comment on posts, discuss them with others and assign tasks to team members - get the work done.

This is taking advantage of 'big data' to leverage the massive amount of information we store in order to draw insights and drive actions. It can be used for both internal collaboration (intranets) and servicing our clients (extranets).

I believe that social media and collaborative environments will prevail, but we need to jump-start the discussion with existing relevant content. However, not everyone must fail with current offerings. Ask Ruth Ward, for example, about her firm's success with community-based social tools.