Know-how to network

Law firms are increasingly accommodating the views and values of the Facebook generation
in many respects. But the business case for social networking isn’t limited to employee engagement and boosting so-called ‘soft skills’. Web 2.0 media can increase efficiency through more effective knowledge sharing right across the firm.

By Ruth Ward, head of knowledge systems and development, Allen & Overy LLP

If someone offered you a set of low-cost business communication and collaboration tools that were guaranteed to bring visible increases in staff and client engagement, yet also decrease your sense of information overload, you would probably be interested to know more.

But if your head of BD, HR, IT or KM were to walk into your office and say: “I think you should have a blog” – or, even worse, “I think I should have a blog” – you might well decide to stop the conversation there!

That’s the Web 2.0 conundrum. Social tools and networks can bring real business value, especially in a professional-services setting. But many partners and practices seem to struggle to get beyond their press-led perceptions of Facebook and Wikipedia, and their natural scepticism of blogging.

Face to face

For most law firms, the Web 2.0 starting point for HR seems to be recruitment, particularly graduate recruitment. It’s an obvious choice – using Web 2.0 for the generation that has gone through university on sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

At A&O, our UK graduate recruitment website includes employee blogs, so potential recruits can read regular posts from trainees, associates and partners about their life at A&O. It’s one of the most popular parts of the website with individual posts regularly getting around 400 hits each month.

Note that these employee blogs are currently A&O’s only ‘single person’ blogs and also our only ‘public’ blogs, open to anyone to read. Public blogs always bring with them the risk of parody, criticism or worse – and the website rollonfriday.com has certainly had a lot of fun with trainee blogging. But our view was that, in this case, the benefits outweighed the risks - and this is a key message for any law firm thinking about any type of corporate blogging. You can’t just develop a plan and policies for blogging per se. The business opportunities and risks for blogging depend on who’s doing it, about what and where; who the expected or possible audience is; and what degree of interaction the audience can have.

Some law firms, following a well-trodden path in US accountancy and other businesses, have also targeted recruits going through university or law school by providing them with an online network to stay in touch with the firm and one another. Some firms have ‘gone native’, setting up a group on Facebook itself and others have set up a proprietary network. An example of this is DLA Piper’s Inside the Tent, launched at the beginning of 2008. When they work well, these groups can provide a strong support network for recruits preparing for life as a trainee solicitor. Ideally, they should do this without putting an extra burden on HR. Indeed, they can potentially even reduce HR co-ordination time by allowing recruits to help one another to find accommodation, set up get-togethers, and answer any frequently asked questions.

Moving to the other end of the relationship, many firms also have groups for alumni – again, sometimes using Facebook or relevant business networks such as Legal OnRamp, or sometimes setting up their own proprietary networks. As with groups for recruits, these alumni sites only reach their full potential if the alumni audience takes advantage of the opportunities to manage and update their own profile and participate in either the alumni network as a whole, or the alumni sub-groups that are relevant to them. There’s currently more of a take-up question here, however, particularly among older alumni. These people may or may not be on Facebook in the first place, but also, importantly, they may be resistant to the whole idea. At A&O, we have gone the proprietary network route for the moment, so that our alumni have the confidence that they are on an A&O site.

On the inside

Looking inwards, Web 2.0 tools can also play a significant role in improving staff engagement and communication. A lot of firms are looking at creating an internal Facebook, often as an add-on to their existing HR database or corporate intranet. Firms have a variety of objectives in doing this. Some are looking for a better solution for expertise and skills location, the idea being that people are more likely to set up and maintain a Facebook style profile including details about what they have recently worked on, or are interested in, than to input this into a formal skills register. Others want to use it to foster the development of internal communities and networks – whether for the trainees or the football team!

At A&O, one of our most successful internal staff networks is ‘Parents@A&O’ launched in early 2008. Staff opt to join and receive alerts from the site, which comprises a ‘group blog’ discussion board and a ‘wiki’ knowledge base. Checking recent posts when writing this article, there were discussions on swimming, cyber safety and slug pellets! The majority of posts are stimulated by A&O parents across the globe but the site is well managed and supported by HR. For example, HR provides a regular ‘Ask the expert’ session on a topic suggested by parents, when members can post questions for a named expert, with all the answers being posted on the wiki for use by current and future members. The A&O focus of conversations and the input from HR differentiate Parents@A&O from other parents’ networks on the internet and it is highly valued by its members.

In the wider business world there are also some examples of longstanding and successful management blogs, by CEOs such as John Varley at Barclays, but I am not aware of any in the legal sector. Jon Stewart, the American TV comedian, described the move by mainstream TV news journalists to have a blog with the same editorial focus and content as their TV news slot as ‘giving voice to the already voiced’. To be successful, I think management blogs need to represent a real change from what has gone before in terms of management updates, they need to be authentic and they need to be regular. It’s also vital to address the question of sustainability upfront, and to decide if readers will be able to make comments and if, when, and how any comments, will be moderated. Management blogging need not, of course, be the preserve of the managing partner. It could work as well at the board level, or for individual legal or support department heads.

At the coalface

Drilling down from firm-wide initiatives, practice and team communities and project spaces have been at the heart of A&O’s Web 2.0 work for a number of years. We have used the same site build for over 50 sites – to improve cross-border communication and collaboration among practice groups and business teams divided by geography and time zones, and to manage business projects and initiatives more effectively. Activity on most of these member-specific sites centres on news, discussions and Q&As on the group blog, but the sites also include a wiki to use as a shared knowledge base or to collaborate on documents and reports and external newsfeeds using RSS and shared bookmarks. Our experience is that these sites work much more effectively than the traditional email, document management (DM) and intranet toolset, and my experience from talking with many law firms and legal departments over the past few years is that most people can immediately see how they would benefit their own business teams – if only they could get the IT buy-in either to buy or build them!

Learning by doing

As mentioned above, our experience is that group blogs are much more effective than email for informally sharing knowledge and processing know-how queries and the generic department-wide ‘does anyone know?’ email. Some A&O teams include this type of knowledge sharing as part of a wider team site and some set up a know-how focused knowledge exchange.

Wikis are also a key know-how tool, but their use in law firms has not yet fully matured. I think this
is partly due to the association of Wikipedia with unauthorised and un-vetted content, and partly due
to the fact that wikis are so flexible. At A&O, we currently use wikis to create informal FAQ resources on different areas and topics, and also more structured know-how resources, for example a section-by-section guide to a particular piece of legislation. Concerns about content quality are small in a trusted community, and are outweighed, in any case, by the potential benefits of capturing and sharing real-time views from across the practice.

Web 2.0 can also bring benefits in terms of training, whether that is in person or virtual. Setting
up an online community for an offsite or face-to-face training event can reduce administration time for the organisers, while simultaneously increasing the pre-course preparation and participation for the attendees. And after the course, the site can be used for immediate follow-up, or as a longer term site, for the course community. Many universities, notably the Open University in the UK, have made a big investment in Web 2.0 to transform the e-learning experience for remote learners. This might simply include having a course or class site where attendees can link to, or download, tutorials and materials, and share questions and comments with the tutor and other participants. The OU has also gone further, however, with the development of truly ‘virtual’ training, by setting up and using virtual learning environments in Second Life. There are a number of similar initiatives in the legal training world.

Expanding the network – client communications

Looking internally, the various Web 2.0 tools described above have a lot to offer client account management, ideally improving communication and collaboration across the relationship team, while at the same time reducing the central management and administrative burden.

In a client-facing setting, however, the Web 2.0 opportunities - and take up – in the legal sector are currently less developed and more disparate. There are a relatively small number of established and successful law firm blogs, which generally seem to be driven by a particular partner, or group, who combine an interest in their own legal area, practice development and technology. I am not aware of any firm seeking to move their whole client current awareness programme into a blog format – either via their general internet site, a legal or business network such as Legal OnRamp, or within a dedicated and secure client space.

To date our focus at A&O has been on client communities for different interest areas and business projects, reflecting what we have done internally. We initially developed our own proprietary sites, but with the advent of Legal OnRamp and other business networks, there are now opportunities to create, and participate in, open and closed groups within third-party networks. While activity in online networks of all kinds is growing rapidly across the legal sector, law firm activity in Second Life still seems to be the preserve of technology and media firms such as Field Fisher Waterhouse, who opened an office there in 2007.

Get going

If your firm is yet to dip its toe into Web 2.0, the message must be to get on with it. If an initial experimentation has stalled or did not live up to expectations, then reflect on the business setting and purpose, as the fault is as likely to lie there as with the technology. Successful Web 2.0 utilisation is all about showing that important business objectives have been met – and so you need to reflect on those business purposes and any broader business or cultural issues.
The technology – particularly now Web 2.0 tools are becoming part of standard offerings such as Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 –should be the least of your worries for once!

Ruth Ward is the head of knowledge systems and development at Allen & Overy LLP.
She can be contacted at: ruth.ward@allenovery.com