Using wikis in a law firm: Replacing practices and procedures manuals

There's lots of in-depth discussion online regarding wiki and enterprise 2.0 strategies for law firms (and many other professional services organisations), but it's often difficult to find specific usage scenarios discussed along with how successful (or unsuccessful) they were.

These examples can be really useful when considering how to introduce your own wiki projects or promote user adoption as they demonstrate how a directly relevant business issue can be solved or improved using enterprise social software.

In our experience good examples (especially if they include social concepts such as collaborative editing, commenting, tagging and notifications) give colleagues a much better understanding of the overall principles of enterprise social software (and how they're not really that scary after all).

An interesting article by Doug Cornelius on his experiences with wikis at Goodwin Procter discusses the wider implications of wikis and document management systems but also highlights one particular use of a wiki that gained good results within his firm - Putting traditional practices and procedures manuals on a wiki. He writes:

"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."

You can download Doug's full article (in Adobe Acrobat / PDF format) here: Wikis and Document Management Systems at Law Firms.

Whilst having a company-wide strategy for enterprise social software is great I think practical examples like this are invaluable in helping people 'get it'.

Another interesting area that highlights the difference between the 'Enterprise 1.0' and 'Enterprise 2.0' approach is the area of current awareness (internal information and knowledge updates) - I'll be posting about this soon.