To Blog or Not to Blog Inside Your Law Firm. That is… | Knowledge Management
When law firms blog to the world, it’s marketing, really. Sheppard Mullin has some great blogs (and a sharp-as-hell web site). So does K&L Gates. Just Google “ediscovery” or “electronic discovery” and see how effective law firm blog marketing can be. (To read more about external law firm blogging, check out Kevin O’Keefe’s Real Lawyers Have Blogs)
But some firms are using blogs to communicate internally. We love the idea because (in theory) it can help cut down on mass emails that contain general, non-urgent information. Those periodic case law update emails are a good example. Blogs are also great because (unlike email) they create an automatic, searchable, taggable archive of content. So, if you need to find that blog post about that certain case law update from three months ago, you can search the blog rather than your Outlook folders (how many Outlook folders do you have?). You can also bring new members of a department up to speed more quickly – “Check the blog…” The result: a real KM tool - a place to store our collective knowledge for quick and easy retrieval. What’s better than that?
SharePoint, which is all the rage lately at Big Law for portal platforms, offers a blogging component. Other solutions include WordPress, Movabletype, and Community Server. There are others, of course, but for enterprise-class functionality, these seem to be the leaders. Let us know if you know of others.
Here is a good on-demand webinar called Enterprise 2.0 Using Social Media in the Workplace from SixApart (the people behind Moveabletype) and Forrester Research about internal blogging.
So, Big Law… do you blog (internally)?
We see it this way: In a few years, external blogs will be as common at law firms as law firm web sites are today. Internal blogs will be as common as email or electronic newsletters are today. While neither will likely soon replace their respective analogues, nobody is going to be asking: “what’s a blog?”
LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management for Lawyers and Law Firms
The key to having blogs and wikis internally is an enterprise RSS feed system to push out updates to users and user groups.
Admin groups are the first candidates on the radar screen. They send out the most internal spam and at the same time fail to communicate changes inside the firm.
Getting lawyers to blog will be a bit more of a challenge, but I agree and think they will come around eventually.
Comment by Doug Cornelius — November 2, 2007 @ 11:09 am
[...] Law Firms Giving Blogs the Stamp of Approval Filed under: Uncategorized — LawyerKM @ 6:30 am Here’s an interesting article from Gina Passarella on law.com about how (externally-facing) blogs are gaining steam in law firms (even large ones). Blogging is great for marketing purposes, but there are other uses for blogs internally. See: To Blog or Not Blog Inside Your Law Firm… [...]
Pingback by Law Firms Giving Blogs the Stamp of Approval « LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms — April 17, 2008 @ 6:58 pm
It’s inevitable…for all industries
Comment by A.Ho — April 21, 2008 @ 11:30 pm
[...] Filed under: Blogs, Law Firms — LawyerKM @ 7:30 am Tags: Blogs I’ve written before about legal blogging. But being a KM guy, I usually focus on the benefits of using blogs inside the law firm, for KM [...]
Pingback by Legal Blogs Create Buzz | Knowledge Management « LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms — April 30, 2008 @ 9:38 am