Blogger in the house : The rise of ‘blawging’ as a knowledge-sharing tool

Weblogs or blogs, as they are more commonly known, have become more popular in recent times, but many might not realise their potential use as a valuable KM tool. KM ‘blawger’ JOY LONDON, knowledge and training manager of Allen & Overy’s US law group, explains the whys and wherefores of blogging in law firms.

Weblog search engine Technorati estimates the number of blogs currently on the web at nearly five million, with new and smarter blogs being launched every day. Once a geekie cyber-phenomenon, the lowly weblog has developed steadily as an effective – and utterly democratic – deployment of internet power, for both personal and professional communication.

Knowledge management, of course, is all about communication, that is, sharing of information and experience among people – and traffic is lively on blogs (sometimes called ‘klogs’) in the KM community. Is it now time for law firms to take the plunge?

The potential benefits of weblogs are readily apparent and already widely used by in-the-know legal types. Since 2003, Bryan Cave, an international law firm based in St. Louis, Missouri, has launched at least ten blogs to exchange information to lawyers and librarians in its network of global offices. Hans Kullin, a Swedish public-relations consultant and marketing-communications manager at Linklaters Advokatbyrå, has also been tasked with creating a law-firm blog to build brand recognition and promote experts in different fields of law. So what are the chances that the weblog will emerge as the first truly persuasive knowledge-sharing vehicle for internal law-firm collaboration among fee earners, paralegals, professional support lawyers, KM managers and librarians? Is it foreseeable that the firm would deploy a weblog to enhance external communication between the firm and its clients, law-firm recruits and alumni, and other consumers of legal information? Should the whole thing be handled one way for the internal law-firm client and another way for the corporate client? And can the blog ever really replace e-mail, the original ‘killer app’?

Let’s take a closer look. Like so many technologies that define our notion of confident modernity, this latest trend in cyber-sophistication has been around since at least 1993 – which is almost forever in cyber years. But only lately has ‘blogging’ become truly user-friendly. Where computer nerds once enjoyed a members-only cyber handshake, now even the computer-challenged can share news and information with a surprisingly personal touch. Blogging is rapidly becoming an everyday means to important ends, where complex technology has turned into an easy-to-use knowledge-sharing tool. A growing range of blogging-software providers like Blogger, Radio Userland and MovableType now offer a catalogue of well-designed templates, which hide most of the HTML code behind easy-to-click icons – at minimal cost, if any, to the blogger. So, like the automobile, the cellular phone and the two-button mouse, blogging software is being used for all sorts of purposes by ordinary people who have no idea how the technology works. Many blawgs – with expansive, searchable and multi-linked archival content – have already become powerful fora, even in technologically conservative professions like law, where law blogging itself is nicknamed ‘blawging’.

Currently, some 500 US blawgs are authored independently by practicing and non-practicing lawyers, law professors, law students and law librarians, and each reflects the interests and opinions of the blog author. Practising lawyers and law professors, for example, typically focus blog content on their own specialised areas of law practice and study (Lyle Roberts’s ‘10b-5 Daily’ blog, Professor Paul Caron’s ‘Tax Prof Blog’, Steve Wood’s ‘UK Freedom of Information Act’ blog). Law students write about the law-school experience (‘Jeremy’s Blog’, the random thoughts of a third-year law student at Harvard, ‘Three Years of Hell to Become the Devil’, a collection of blogs written by Columbia Law School students, and the self-explanatory ‘Sixth Form’ blog). Law librarians and non-practising lawyers tend to concentrate on legal research, legal technology and knowledge management (Genie Tyburski’s ‘Virtual Chase’, Ron Friedmann’s ‘Strategic Legal Technology’, Tom Collins’s ‘Knowledge Aforethought’. A look at blawg titles – ‘Law Dawg Blawg’, ‘Ernie the Attorney’, ‘Legal Sanity’ – suggests how richly distinctive the personal stamp can be in these legal blogs.

Recently, organisations in all sectors have begun to develop intranet ‘team blogging’ initiatives as a means to create or enhance key relationships within and across departments, groups and offices. Believe it or not, even lawyers, who are notoriously averse to transparency and sharing, often feel empowered by the ability to add content or editorial to a blog of their own. On internet blawgs, lawyers often freely dispense intellectual assets, for which billable clients are willing to pay a small fortune. Remarkably, intellectual giants Richard Posner, a US Federal Circuit judge, and Gary S. Becker, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, have recently teamed up to launch the ‘Becker-Posner’ blog.

Blawging and KM, of course, are a natural pair, because online searching and linking are the most basic tools of knowledge management. And the match-up is only sweetened by the human intangibles. KM is as much concerned with the people-as-knowledge reserve, as with the technology and data that people both produce and reference. Along with syndication tools and push technology, a well-focused content-driven KM blawg offers all-in-one access to legal KM’s crucial dual audience: a) legal professionals, working in knowledge management; and b) knowledge managers, looking for information relevant to the legal profession.

Blog-like openness is precisely what KM aspires to within the real-life law firm. Any firm’s true intellectual capital resides in the experiences, relationships, ideas and work processes of its personnel. Management of these human resources means cultivating interpersonal processes and a culture of desire to share intellectual capital throughout the firm. Blawging can help.

There is, in fact, no way to keep up with the sea of information on the web, nor to avoid time-devouring tributaries. But subject-specific blog authors help to chart a course by isolating links to the most valuable sources of web information. And the blogger instantly becomes part of a larger online community, concurrently with the opportunity to establish niche expertise and credibility.

There are hardly any big secrets in blog technology, and those that exist are managed by the blogging software provider. There are no intermediaries. Publishing is in real time. On the user-end, it’s as easy as e-mailing. The hyperlink is unquestionably the engine driving the now-classic blog phenomenon of exponential expansion, but its real power is in the culture of link reciprocity. Bloggers indulge in exuberant sharing of commentary and mutual links, passing information quickly to tens of thousands, in what is now referred to as the blogosphere. Typically, bloggers researching and archiving niche-specific news and developments far and wide will be contacted online by others near and far, inquiring about content or permission to share a link. And then they’ll tell two people, and so on…

Interestingly, the blog suits the cognitive aspects of knowledge exchange, delivering huge volumes of complex information in small, digestible chunks. In 1956, in a landmark paper entitled, ‘The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information’, psychologist George A. Miller introduced the theory of ‘information-chunking’. Experimenting with short-term memory, Miller showed that seven of any similarly classified data (plus or minus two) is just about all the brain can take in at once. Even in daily life, there are often simply far too many stimuli to process and store in our memories. Therefore, suggested Miller, we have to organise the information by ‘chunking’ it together to make better use of our mental capacity. For example, if we think of corgie, poodle, collie, schnauzer and terrier separately, it can take more time and effort than if we were to attribute the name ‘dogs’ to them all as a group. In blogging, small chunks of content are accessible by individual links, influencing the way content is produced, discovered and read, in a range more sweeping than once imagined.

The real-world effect of an intranet blawg serves law firms especially, where the paper avalanche of information tends to proliferate faster than it can be filed properly. A well-designed blawg can serve as a critical document-management tool for organising and archiving legal information. The very act of trading relevant links and useful ideas electronically, via blog posts and reader response, captures crucial matter-related content automatically, rendering it searchable and browsable. For the minimal cost of establishing an in-house weblog, the firm acquires a valuable, annotated repository, user-friendly and equally accessible to individual lawyers, internal practice groups (banking, corporate, etc.), and organisational departments (library and IT, education and training, business development, HR services). Not incidentally, both productivity and information exchange increase through better time management and resource allocation.

Any law firm considering the leap to in-house blogs should focus its front-end resources on the grand design. Planners should outline objectives carefully, answering key questions about the firm’s specific goals in creating a blog. But partners or other stakeholders who need convincing will find lots of good models among their corporate clients who are already in the blogosphere.

Consider the corporate blogs of Microsoft, GE, Ford, SAP and Gartner. Even top-level executives are getting in on the act. HDNet’s CEO and Dallas Mavericks’s owner Marc Cuban posts to ‘Blog Maverick’. The COO at Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz, writes ‘Jonathan Schwartz’s Blog’. From the director of digital publishing at Guardian Newspapers comes ‘Simon Waldman’s Blog’. These blogs percolate with innovative and potentially lucrative ideas that ought to make compelling reading for ambitious fee earners.

Blogging has demonstrated its viability as an online force, adaptable to a vast array of purposes. As the blogosphere continues to mature, more lawyers will implement blawgs in unexpected ways. But the basic rules of successful blogging remain the same: keep it short, simple and interesting. Take advantage of the web’s intrinsic flexibility to stay up to date. Use the online tech tools that will let your readers efficiently find every bit of what you have to offer. And link to your neighbours in the blogosphere. It’s good business.

Based in New York, Joy London is know-how and training manager for Allen & Overy’s US law group. Her blawg, ‘excited utterances’, can be read at www.excitedutterances.blogspot.com. She can be contacted at joy.london@newyork.allenovery.com