Enterprise 2.0 – Page 4 – Compliance Building

The Legal and Regulatory Implications of Internet Privacy

Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP and Protiviti presented a webinar on the legal implications of social networking. These are my notes.

Rocco Grillo of Protiviti started off the presentation. Social networks have become part of many people’s day-to-day work. They have not replaced email, but are still robust communication tools. The first presenter offered the example of a Fortune 500 Company that wanted to shut down access to several social networking sites and make the use of them during working hours as a terminable offense. They found out that their human resources group used Facebook extensively as part of their recruiting program.

He moved on to social networking risks, pointing out the ability of these sites to include trojans or viruses to computers. (Although he did not offer any examples of how they offer any more of threat than other websites.) Rocco emphasized the importance to create policy and work with your company to craft one that takes into account how people in your organization uses these tools. Use of the sites is not an IT decision. You need to work with a larger group of stakeholders.

He noted the ability of profile spoofing on these sites. How do you know that the person behind that profile is that person? Avoid publishing common verification information like your date of birth or mother’s maiden name. Rocco shared some other scare stories.

Rocco did move on to balancing the risks with the benefits of the tools. Shutting down social networks does not remove the risks. You need a balanced strategy. These are powerful tools, but you need to make people aware of some of the risks.

Ben Duranske took over next. He is part of Pillsbury’s virtual worlds and video games practice. He pointed out that besides Second Life, many of these virtual worlds are pitched towards kids. Sites like Webkins and Club Penguin target a younger audience than Second Life. The roadblocks for virtual worlds are bandwidth, processing power, and ease of access. Since they are proprietary, virtual worlds are walled gardens and there is no standardization. These sites allow users to create things. There are real dollars involved and real money. The Terms of Service of these sites largely concede ownership of your content to the site and allow them to disclose lots of the information. They are very willing to respond to subpoenas requested the revelation of user identities.

Ben laid out some key concerns regarding privacy in mainstream virtual worlds and games:

Violation of Export Restrictions
Loss of Trade Secret Protection
Inadvertent Privacy Policy Violations
Destruction of Confidentiality Protections

He pointed out that he does not communicate with client in virtual worlds regarding their cases.

Since many of these sites are targeted at kids, you need to make sure you comply with the requirements of Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

Wayne Matus of Pillsbury moved on to cloud computing. Your information and the things you are doing are not happening on your computer or server, but are actually somewhere else. He pointed out four principal types of cloud computing:

Internet-based services
Infrastructure as a service
platform as a service
software as a service

Why should lawyers care? The Fourth Amendment. It is not clear if those protections apply to cloud computing. Every man’s house is his castle. But is your piece of the cloud part of your castle? Do you have a reasonable expectation of privacy for this information up in the cloud?

In United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435 (1976), the Supreme Court held a government’s demand on a bank did not affect any 4th Amendment interest of its customer. In United States v. Ziegler (2007), the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit acknowledged that an employee has a right to privacy in his workplace computer. The court also found that an employer can consent to searches and seizures that would otherwise be illegal.

You need to comply with the Patriot Act. You have some uncertainties as to what jurisdiction applies. You may not know where you information actually exists. There are lots of complex laws that limit the flow information: HIPPA, Tax returns, Attorney-Client privilege, Electronic Communications Privacy Act, Fair Credit Reporting Act, etc. Part of the problem is that many of the contractual agreements with the cloud computing providers do not adequately address many of these issues.

Wayne offered up some things to include in the terms of service:

Use of data
Location of data
Encryption
No change of terms
Destruction
Ownership (assignment)
Subpoena
Audit rights

Document Behaviors

A version of this post originally appeared in my old blog: KM Space.

I have been focusing a lot of attention on the behaviors towards documents. After all, a wiki page is just another type of document. When producing documents, I have noted five types of behaviors: collaborative, accretive, iterative, competitive and adversarial.

Collaborative
With collaborative behavior, there are multiple authors each with free reign to add content and edit existing content in a document, and they do so.

Accretive
With accretive behavior, authors add content, but rarely edit or update the existing content. Accretive behavior is seen more often in email than documents. Each response is added on top of the existing string of information with no one synthesizing the information in a coherent manner. I have seen this in wikis as well where people will add content but not edit others content.

Iterative
With iterative behavior, existing content is copied to a new document. The document stands on its own as a separate instance of content. The accretive behavior is distinguished from the iterative behavior by the grouping of similar content together. With accretive behavior the content is being added to the same document, effectively editing the document. With iterative behavior, the person creates a new document rather than adding to an existing document.

Competitive
With competitive document behavior, there is a single author who seeks comments and edits to the document as a way to improve the content. However, interim drafts and thoughts are kept from the commenters. The transmission of the content to a client or a more senior person inside the firm will result in a competitive behavior.

Adversarial
Adversarial behavior is where the authors are actually competing for changes to the content for their own benefit. Although there may be a common goal, the parties may be seeking different paths to that goal or even have different definitions of the goal.

Collaborative, accretive and iterative content production are largely internal behaviors. Competitive and adversarial are largely external document behaviors. Of course, a document may end up with any or all of these behaviors during its lifecycle.

I decided to re-post and update this based on Jordan Furlong’s The three types of collaboration on Law 21. Jordan set up three types of lawyer collaboration lawyer-to-lawyer, lawyer-to-client, and client-to-client. Read his post and let us know how you think we can mesh these two concepts together.

See also:

Wikis and Document Management Systems – previous post (re-posted from KM Space)

Extranets for Law Firm and Client Collaboration – Moving Beyond Email

project_extranet

One of the problems with collaboration between law firms and their clients is that too much of it happens through email. Email is fast, allows you to send the same message to lots of people, and is inexpensive.

But it is still a set of messages sent back and forth, much like the Pony Express. To figure out what is going on you need to comb through the messages and hope that you end up looking at the latest message. Since email is so fast and so inexpensive, you often end up with a barrage of short ineffective messages.

With email, the message ends up in a different place for the sender and recipient. If I send the email, it is in my sent items and it ends up in the inbox for the recipient. Each recipient may do something different with that email once it’s in their email in-box. Some may pile it on top of the thousands of other emails in their inbox, some may file it in another email folder, some may print and delete, and some may just delete.

There has been talk for years of using extranets to change the way law firms and their clients communicate. Unfortunately, it seems there has been more talking than there have been successful extranets.

The trouble with deploying a successful extranet is finding both an attorney team and a client team that want to share information by using an extranet.

The most common extranet for a legal team is the document war room seen in larger acquisition transactions. There is a great benefit to having the documents in one place, typically with some great security. But they lack the communications tools needed to move it beyond being merely an online fileroom.

An extranet can be poorly organized and messy, making the relevant information hard to find. But organizing the information in a meaningful way can save lots of time and money for both the law firm and the client.

One of challenges for using an extranet platform is deciding which one to use. Should it be sponsored by the law firm or the client? If it is sponsored by the law firm, a few issues arise. One, the law firm will have to allow access to the client’s other law firms working on similar matters or the client will have to work with a different extranet for each of its different law firms. If the client sponsors the extranet, then the client bears the expense and maintenance burden of the extranet platform. There also will be the expense and resources spent on showing the law firm how to use the extranet platform.

One barrier to overcome is that there are a broad variety of possible extranet platforms that operate very differently and provide information in very different ways. Some of the newer 2.0 tools show how the web can be better used as a collaboration space. They also break down some of the barriers to using an extranet. Perhaps the next generation of extranets will be more effective. The answer may be SharePoint. Microsoft is pushing its SharePoint platform causing it to become more pervasive and bringing some of the concepts of Enterprise 2.0 into many business environments. By having a common platform, you could break down some of the barriers to extranet adoption.

How to reduce the cost of audits, operations, training and compliance with SharePoint!

These are my notes from a webinar presented by Knowledge Management Associates, Inc. that featured speaker: Sean Megley, KMA SharePoint Architect and resident “compliantist.”

What contributes to the cost of compliance?:

Lack of Tools
Ad hoc audits
Random frameworks
Unreliable results

Sean thinks we should free ourselves from the “tyranny of spreadsheets and email!”

The greater the number of people you can get involved in compliance, the better the results. You want it to be easy, you want to get lots of people involved, and you want it to be part of the workflow. He thinks using SharePoint as a central database and portal effectively centralizes the processes and information.

Being in compliance means that you have evidence of compliance. You need a log to prove the steps you have taken.

Sean went through some more theories of compliance and then moved on to display a model SharePoint portal for compliance. The portal also incorporates InfoPath for replicated business processes. The portal logs the forms and data from InfoPath.

Sean used a wiki as a way to communicate, with links to key documents and policies.

Sean notes that the heart of SharePoint is a document repository. You can store documents and wrap information around the documents.

SharePoint has an alert feature built into its lists and libraries. The alert can trigger action based around compliance. SharePoint will let you know when something is changed or added.

SharePoint has key performance indicators (KPIs) to track controls.

Knowledge Management Associates is offering to pre-package the portal with controls and regulatory requirements built-in as a starting point. For example, he has put the text of a regulation and then mapped it to the controls of the company.

Why SharePoint and not Excel? SharePoint takes information in a spreadsheet and exposes it for other people to see and to allow other inputs and logging of changes.

SharePoint can be used for project management. It has a rudimentary Gannt chart tool.

The big question is whether you want to inflict SharePoint on your co-workers and IT staff. It can be a beast to manage and some of the 2.0 tools barely work.

See:

Sharepoint and Enterprise 2.0: The good, the bad, and the ugly by Dion Hinchcliffe for ZDnet
SharePoint Wiki Disaster – from KM Space
Wikis in SharePoint 2007 – from KM Space
Blogging in SharePoint 2007 – from KM Space

Five Things Every Legal Practice Should Know About 2.0

At the recent LegalTech conference, Lee Bryant and May Abraham presented on Web 2.0 tool inside law firms (a/k/a Enterprise 2.0).

Lee shares his thoughts on his Headshift blog: Five Things Every Legal Practice Should Know About 2.0:

In the session, we tried to get across just how easy it is to find meaningful use cases for the use of social tools inside a law firm, and the great potential for cost and time savings they present. We touched on a few Headshift cases studies including Allen and Overy, who have been using social tools for informal knowledge sharing successfully for over three years, and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, whose wiki spaces have replaced an old intranet with increasing levels of traffic and participation. But we also looked at a classic DIY ‘mashup’ approach within the Australian firm Mallesons, who have built some fantastic applications using combinations of open source and other tools.

Mary shares her thoughts on her Above and Beyond KM blog: Tales From LegalTech: Five Things Every Legal Practice Should Know About Web 2.0:

One of the reasons I agreed to participate in this session was that I’ve begun to experience the benefits of social media in my knowledge management work and could see the great potential for its use more generally in a legal practice. There are so many things lawyers do that require the participation of others — planning and organizing throughout a matter’s life cycle, discussions with clients and other lawyers, negotiations with counter-parties, drafting legal documents, closings, post-closing compliance and clean-up, etc. What would happen if we could use Web 2.0 tools to shift these activities out of the current paradigm of expensive face-to-face meetings, ineffective conference calls held while all participants are multitasking, and asynchronous e-mail exchanges? What would change?

There are many great uses for blogs, wikis and other 2.0 tools inside the firewall of your organization (even if it is not a law firm). These 2.0 tools are very useful from a compliance perspective.

They can be useful in drafting policies. A working group can use the wiki to collaborate in creating the initial draft of a policy. You can publish a draft policy in a blog post and let the broader audience use the blog comment feature to provide input about the policy.

These 2.0 tools generally have great search features. They should make it easier for the people in your organization to find the relevant policy. Since you can embed links in the policies, you can link to other relevant policies. It also will enable a hub and spoke approach to policies, allowing you to cross-reference policies instead of repeating similar items in multiple policies.

Most of the concerns about web 2.0 (anonymity, nasty comments, etc.) go away when the audience is your coworkers. They are also easier to deploy and easier to use that traditional technology tools.

Mary is long-time friend from my days in knowledge management. I met Lee at the 2008 Enterprise 2. o Conference. (You can see my live blogging of Enterprise 2.0 on my old KM Space blog.) Both Mary and Lee have great insights about how these tools can help your organization.

Four Types of Search

I spent a fair amount of time at a prior job looking at document management systems and enterprise search. As part of the knowledge management effort, it was key to figure out how people found the information or documents they needed. In reviewing user behavior, I have identified four different types of searches for documents:

Fetch
Recall
Research
Precedent

Below is more information on each type of search and user expectations for search results. I will also discuss how well a document management system (DMS) or enterprise search tool will handle the different types of searches.

Fetch

A “fetch” search is when the user has a document ID (with a Document Management System) or a file name (with a file server system).

The user would expect the single document to be returned. There should be no need for relevancy rankings.

The “fetch” search is the most basic of the four types of searches. It is such a basic part of a DMS and works so well in a DMS that most users do not even think of it as a search. Nonetheless, it is the most common search and the most important. A user expects to be able to get a specific document back instantly for editing or reuse, without having to interpret search results.

A “fetch” is core functionality of a DMS. An enterprise search tool would fall short in this type of search. The DMS is keyed to find specific metadata from the document profile. The enterprise search tool typically uses the metadata to influence the relevancy rankings of a particular document.

Recall

A “recall” search is when the user knows the document exists and has some specific information about the document that the user can distinguish it from other documents.

Examples are: documents edited in the last five days, all the documents for a particular matter, all of the purchase agreement for a client.

The user will expect a a list of documents that will be over-inclusive, but the list will have information to distinguish the particular document the user is looking for from the rest of the documents.

A DMS excels at this type of search and is core functionality for a DMS. The enterprise search will generally not perform well at this type of search. For the DMS search to be successful, user input is required to make sure the metadata/profile of the document is accurate.

Research

A “research” search is when the user is looking for documents on a topic. The user may not know if any documents on the topic even exist. The search is typically for keywords in the document.

An example is: information on “arms-dealing”.

A user will expect a list of documents displayed by relevancy.

An enterprise search tool excels at this type of search. The user is looking for terms in the document. The enterprise search tool can use its algorithm to identify which documents have the most treatment of the search terms.

A typical DMS will fall short on a “research” search. A typical DMS does not rank searches based on relevancy. If a search yielded dozens or more results, the user would have no reference as to where to start a review of search results. A typical DMS also has an inferior text search engine.

It is the frustration when running a “research” search that users cry out for an enterprise search tool.

Precedent

A “precedent” search is a search for a model document.

Generally, the key to finding a good precedent is knowing the context in which a document was previously used, rather than text in the document itself.

An example is: ” a purchase and sale agreement for a retail shopping center in Florida”. “Purchase and Sale Agreement” will be in the text of the document and the name of the document. But “Florida” and “retail shopping center” may not appear in the text of the document. If they do appear, they would appear infrequently.

They key to making a precedent search working is leveraging the document metadata against other systems. For instance, we require users to assign a document to a particular matter. We plan to use that matter identification to pull information from other sources and impute that information on the document.

The other key to a precedent search is using a faceted search to narrow the search results using the additional metadata.

A version of this post appeared in my old blog KM Space: 4 Types of Search.

The Contribution Revolution

The October issue of the Harvard Business Review has an article by Scott Clark: The Contribution Revolution – Letting Volunteers Build Your Business. Mr. Clark challenges companies to tap into the contributions of people beyond their organizations. (He has clearly driven the Kool-Aid offered by Don Tapscott in Wikinomics.)

One section caught my attention:

I also began to see that user contributions are fueling some of the world’s fastest-growing and most competitively advantaged organizations—in some cases revolutionizing the economics of entire industries by radically shrinking their cost structures. Think of eBay, which opened as an online store with no inventory, leaving it up to customers to fill its “shelves” with goods to sell. Or Wikipedia, which gutted the value proposition of 230-year-old Encyclopaedia Britannica by offering a free encyclopedia written and updated frequently by unpaid amateurs. [I added the emphasis on these last two words.]

I understand the use of “unpaid” or “amateur”, but not both. People are clearly volunterring their time and energy using web 2.0 tools. Authors and editors do not get paid to contribute to wikipedia. I do not get paid to write this blog. That does not mean I am an “unpaid amateur.” Many of the contributers to wikipedia are experts in those fields. They are not “amateurs.”

Wikis and Document Management Systems

This post was originally published in my old blog: KM Space.

Versions of this article appeared as

Which Route?

KM Legal, Volume 2 Issue 4, June 2008 http://www.kmlegalmag.com/coverfeature

EI Case study: Wiki versus DMS at Goodwin Procter

Inside Knowledge, Volume 11 Issue 8
http://www.ikmagazine.com/

The document management system has long been the factory assembly line for most big law firms. In turn, the document management system becomes the largest searchable repository of knowledge in a law firm. With the rise of enterprise 2.0 technologies and their alignment with knowledge management, the question arises how these new technologies might affect the use of existing technologies, like the document management system. One of the most promising enterprise 2.0 technologies for knowledge management is the wiki.

Definition of a Wiki

At its core, a wiki is a collection of editable pages on the web. Each time a wiki page is edited and saved, a new version is created. Also, when the wiki page is saved, the wiki platform will send out a notification of the changes to subscribers to that wiki page. A typical feature of the wiki platform is that it is easy to compare changes between any two versions of a wiki page.

Wikipedia is the most famous wiki. Wikipedia.org is a web-based, free content encyclopedia project. This site is based on a wiki platform, open for anyone to add content or edit existing content. With over 9 million articles in more than 250 languages, and over 2.2 million articles in English alone, Wikipedia is several times larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica. One key step that Wikipedia took was to eliminate any requirement of registration to add or edit content. Anyone can anonymously edit wiki pages in Wikipedia. Rarely would a firm allow for anonymous editing of wiki used within the firm. Most wiki platforms deployed inside a firm’s firewall will allow a single sign-on so the editor is recognized from their initial sign-on to the network.

Wikis are attractive as a knowledge management tool because they it make very easy to contribute content and easy to find the content. Most wikis offer an easy to use “What You See Is What You Get” page editor that resembles a simple word-processing program. Since the wiki content is in the form of a web page most search engines can easily index and search the contents of the wiki.

Definition of a Document Management System

A document management system (DMS) is a computer system used to track and store electronic documents. Those electronic documents can include word-processing documents, presentations, scanned documents, spreadsheets and a variety of document formats.

A typical DMS will automatically tag the document with a specific reference identification. This identification allows for immediate retrieval of the document. The DMS will allow (or require) you to add metadata about the document. For law firms, that metadata will typically include a designation of the client and the particular matter for the client. This allows you to search for a document based on specific criteria about the document in addition to the text of the document.

The DMS will also allow you to add security to the document, so it can be private to the individual, limited to the matter team, limited to the client or to exclude specific people (as may be required for ethical purposes). The DMS allows you to store multiple versions of a particular document so that you can track the edits to the document.

A DMS succeeds because it offers more functionality than the user would have from saving the document to a standard drive. The DMS offers greater searching and categorization of documents. The unique identification marker on the document allows you to quickly identify the exact document in question. This identification is much shorter than the long file folder designation you would get from a file located on a standard drive. The DMS can also easily be tied into the word-processing software. In the end it easy to contribute to the DMS and easy to find content in the DMS.

DMS and Wikis at Goodwin Procter

Almost a decade ago at the beginning of my firm’s knowledge management group, one of the first action items was the selection of iManage (now Interwoven’s Worksite product) as the firm’s DMS. We now have over 8 million documents in the DMS. Nearly all of the documents produced by the lawyers and staff in the firm are stored in the DMS.

Our existing intranet is built on Microsoft’s SharePoint 2003 platform. A great deal of the content on the intranet is merely links to documents in the DMS. Users update content by opening and editing the content in the DMS. That shields them from the clunkier web editing and process on the existing intranet. It also allows them to use the version control features of the DMS to trace the history of the document and its content.Over the past year, we have been planning and implementing an upgrade of our intranet to Microsoft’s SharePoint 2007 platform. Wikis, blogs and some other enterprise 2.0 tools are included as part of SharePoint 2007 platform. At the outset of planning for our upgrade, we decided to actively use some of these tools to see how they worked. In particular, wikis caught our attention as a great tool for knowledge management within the firm. I used the free test version of PBWiki for a variety of projects: managing our knowledge management projects, co-authoring an article on social networking, planning a conference, managing transactions for a client, preparing and gathering the results of a survey of law firm knowledge management leaders, and gathering definitions of knowledge management.Comparison of Functionality

In comparing the features of a wiki and the features of a DMS, a wiki combines more of the features in the document production process into one package. A wiki has a basic word processing program, with a simple editor for creating content. The wiki has a flat list of wiki pages within the wiki platform. (Although some wiki platforms do allow for greater organization.) The wiki has the ability to compare changes between versions of a wiki page. The wiki has a notification process that alerts subscribers to the wiki page when changes or additions occur.

The wiki combines features of a word-processing program, a DMS, a document comparison program and an email program into one package. Of course, a wiki does not have all of the bells and whistles that these four programs do.

The strength of the DMS lies in it rich metadata collection, version control and security. Within a law firm, it is important to be able to retrieve all of the documents for a particular client or for a particular matter for a client. And perhaps even more important is the ability to apply security limitations to documents for a particular client or matter. For example, a document for public company merger would have security applied to limit viewing to the matter team in an effort to avoid the disclosure of the transaction.

Document Behaviors

A wiki and DMS are both focused on producing, storing and sharing content. A wiki page is just another type of document. When producing content, I have noted five types of behaviors: collaborative, accretive, iterative, competitive and adversarial. In a collaborative scenario, there are multiple authors each with free reign to add content and edit existing content in a document, and they do so. With accretive behavior, authors add content, but rarely edit or update the existing content. With iterative, there is single author controlling changes to the document. The document may have originated from another source, but stands on its own as a separate instance of content. With competitive content creation, there is a single author who seeks comments and edits to the document as a way to improve the content. However, interim drafts and thoughts are kept from the commenters. Adversarial behavior is where the authors are actually competing for changes to the content for their own benefit. Although there may be a common goal, the parties may be seeking different paths to that goal or even have different definitions of the goal.

Typical Behaviors With a DMS

The principal behavior for use of content in he DMS is iterative. Lawyers will search for and reuse existing content in a DMS. But rarely will they change an existing document. Generally, a document in the DMS was drafted for a particular issue for a particular client. They reuse existing content, but create a new iteration of that content. Lawyers will work collaboratively in drafting documents, but the process is iterative. They draft the document with some collaboration with their assistant in finalizing and editing the draft. The draft is circulated for comments. Then the lawyer creates a new iteration of the document as a new version of the document in the DMS. The lawyer then incorporates the changes they accept, finalize this new draft and circulate again.

The transmission of the content to a client or a more senior person inside the firm will result in a competitive behavior. A junior person will generally want to hide interim drafts and issues from the senior person. The junior person is looking to impress and move up in the firm. The same behavior is typical with a client. The client is expecting vetted, finished work for their review and comment. With a lawyer-client relationship there is the additional and important issue of liability for mistakes resulting in possible malpractice and personal liability for the lawyer.

Accretive behavior is seen more often in email than documents. Each response is added on top of the existing string of information with no one synthesizing the information in a coherent manner.

Typical Behaviors with a Wiki

I have seen two principal behaviors in using wikis. The first is accretive. With this behavior, the person will add content to the wiki, but not update or edit existing content. This is largely the learned behavior from email. The second behavior is collaborative, where the person will add content, but also edit existing content.

The accretive behavior is distinguished from the iterative behavior by the grouping of similar content together. With accretive behavior the content is being added to the same wiki page, effectively editing the document. With iterative behavior, the lawyer creates a new document rather than adding to an existing document.

When to Use a Document in the DMS

The traditional DMS process is best used when the production of content is adversarial, rather than collaborative. Generally all discussions between opposing counsel are adversarial, even in transactional law. With collaborative behavior in a typical wiki, there is no control over the addition or editing of content, other than responding to edits or locking the wiki page from editing. You give up the control of authoriship. Most of the bad behavior stories from wikipedia come from an adversarial editing process. A robust infrastructure has grown as part of wikipedia to deal with adversarial editing.

The DMS is the better repository for documents that enter a competitive or adversarial behavior. The lawyer will want a record of what was contained in each version of the document as the content was changed by the author.

When to Use a Wiki

The question is what content in the law firm should you “wiki-fy”?

Of the document behaviors, a wiki is an exceptional platform for collaborative treatment of documents. Ownership of the document is less important than the collection of the content into one synthesized place.

One great use of a wiki is to replace a practices and procedures manual. One of the first questions I hear when a group creates a practices and procedures manual is how will they know when it changes. The typical behavior is to draft the manual in a word processing program, save it into the DMS, then email the group when it is complete. The recipient will then print it out or refer back to the email when using the manual. With the manual in a wiki, the notification of changes happens as soon as the change is made. The manual becomes an active flow of information rather than the republishing of a manual.

I had some success using a wiki to manage the internal closing agendas for a client with several transactions occurring in the office at any one time. Instead of one person needing to control the edits, the entire client team can update any closing agenda at any time. When viewing the wiki page, it will always be the most up-to date location of information. As changes are made to an agenda, the wiki platforms sends out a notification of the change to the entire internal client team. The DMS behavior would be to maintain the closing agenda in a word-processing document. A single person would be responsible for keeping it up to date (usually the most junior person). After an edit or a group of edits, the author would email the updated agenda to the client team, who would then have to discern changes or eschew a version full of the marked changes. The wiki collapses the document process into a shorter series of steps and provides a richer flow of information.

Wiki While You Work

As law firms begin implementing wikis, they will need to identify the best way to use this new tool. Wikis can simplify the production of content by reducing the number of programs and the steps needed to produce the content. Although they are not appropriate for all types of content, they are an excellent tool to add to your knowledge management program.