Wie schon im ersten Vlog dieser Dreierserie berichtet, sind sich auch Kanzleien und Rechtsberater des Potentials von Enterprise 2.0 bewusst: „Law firms and inhouse legal counsel are turning to social media“.

Hier im zweiten Teil des mit Christoph Schmaltz (Mitarbeiter von Headshift, London) geführten Interviews beantwortet er meine Frage: „What is inefficient in the traditional ways of working?“ mit einem Fallbeispiel, wie sich das aufwendige Erstellen von Newslettern durch eine Arbeitsorganisation mit RSS und Wiki kundenorientierter, zeitnaher und dazu noch kostengünstiger gestaltet.

• Information gathering of current decisions and infos in the legal space is kind of like a food chain: There are Knowledge Management lawyers or Professional Support lawyers who gather all that information.
• So far they have subscribed to a lot of legal services; they put the info into a word document e.g., and sent it around. 500 people did exactly the same, but they did not know about it. It was a very inefficient way of gathering information.
• Worse that that, this information was then taken, analyzed by people, and put into newsletters (about 120 „flying around“; people did not know what kinds of newsletters existed, and which were relevant to them). They spend a lot of money creating these newsletters. Clients did not really care about them because they were very generic. What they wanted to have was customized information.
• To get to that granularity, managing information needs to be organized in a much better way: The information gathering should be done using RSS aggregation. … The RSS subscribed info is put into a wiki where people can collaboratively work on a piece, rather than copy&paste it into a word document and send it around, which leads to many different versions. The value adding activities now take place in the wiki, a very transparent way of working. And then that info can be fed to the partners; they add their own analysis and provide information tailored to their clients.
• Normally you would have to ask your IT-department to set up a «system» for you, and it takes weeks even months. And now with a mouse-click they can open up their own system or space. E.g. Freshfields, when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, over night they could create their own system; based on that information they were able to take better decisions in a much more timely manner than was possible before.

Weiterführende Links:
Hier geht es zur Kurzinfo über die Inhalte, inkl. Fallstudien, in diesem Bericht, der über die Ark Group bezogen werden kann.
Im März startete übrigens die Kooperation mit Headshift, die ausgewählte Fallstudien für die Enterprise 2.0 Fallstudienplattform zur Verfügung stellen.