Law Firms Using Wikis

Mark Gerow, an IT professional with the Fenwick & West law firm in San Francisco has written an interesting article on the use of Wikis by law firms.

He writes:

The adoption and use of wikis within law firms follows an evolutionary path from indifference to skepticism, to partial, then full adoption. The rate at which a firm moves along this adoption curve will depend both on how quickly legal professionals embrace the belief that collaborative authorship can efficiently produce high-quality reference materials, as well as how effectively technical professionals implement the tools for control and organization of the authorship process that lawyers demand. In this article I've outlined the key features and techniques that have enabled my firm to realize success with our wikis, as well as provided an example of a hybrid approach that allows lawyers and legal staff to create an annotated "forms library" combining a rich narrative on usage with a library of exemplar documents.

For the full article click here:  Adopting Wikis in Law Firms.

I think the fear for most people is opening up a legal treatise as a Wiki would make it unreliable because unreliable information could be posted.  The problem with Wikis, however, may be quite the opposite.  What I have seen, however, in past attempts to use Wikis for law is that they haven't worked because of lack of participation.  A friend of mine tried to create a Wiki of Minnesota law and couldn't get anyone to post to it.

And Wikis have certainly have their doubters.  Kenneth Adams, who is no Luddite stranger to social media, offers what he terms his "party-pooper take on why wikis of limited use for contract drafting" in a 2007 NYLJ article "Wiki, Anyone?"  He points to the participation problem that the Wiki of Minnesota law found, uncertainties about the quality of the information, and inconsistent usage.  As far as a platform for collaborative contract drafting, I have to agree with Kenneth that there are better tools than Wikis - Google Docs and now Apple's iWorks online platform.

The Legal Education Society of Alberta has plans to take one of their deskbooks and turn it into a Wiki.  Jennifer Flynn is managing that project.  Jennifer has spent a good deal of time in her graduate work studying social networks and how they work, so if anyone can get something like that working, it's Jennifer.  I am looking forward to seeing her progress.

Stephen Nipper, has an excellent post about use of Wikis a law firm, in particular an IP firm, as an internal resource.  Mediawiki as a Patent Law Firm's Knowledge Management System.  This should be about as non-controversial as it comes in a law firm - it is the old "brief bank" but better and easier.  Mediawiki is free and looks very easy to set up.  It strikes me that even for a solo or small firm, this would be a great system for collecting research and forms.

- Peter H. Berge

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