Tag: wikis

Wikis, Learning, Teaching and Compliance

wikipedia

I am a believer that the use of 2.0 tools can help compliance professionals. (Hopefully, this blog is a part of that proof.)

Moving to the inherently open communication of 2.0 tools from the inherently private channel communication of email can expose sunlight on behavior and expose information. Incorrect information and behavior can be corrected. Bad information and bad behavior can be seen and stopped before it snowballs into something larger.

I often hear people take the position that the digital youngsters coming out of college can use these Web 2.0 tools as easily as dialing a phone or that they are demanding them in the workplace. I don’t think that’s not true.

Law Schools and Wikis

Eric Goldman and Luis Villa shared their experiences in using wikis as part of their classrooms. It certainly sounds like their students struggled with using these tools, both behind the firewall and in the public Wikipedia.

In Mr. Goldman’s case he offered his law students the opportunity to publish an article in Wikipedia for 20% of their grade. About a quarter of the students in his cyberlaw class at Santa Clara University School of Law took him up on his offer.

In reaction to that article, Mr. Villa recounted his experience using a school-hosted wiki as part of his classes at Columbia Law School.

Other wiki concepts, like extensive linking, or publishing drafts to the world in wiki-style, were apparently even more strange to most of my classmates. None of the four class wikis were deeply interlinked or cross-referenced, outside of what was necessary to create a table of contents and occasional outlinks to wikipedia. Similarly, few students were willing to post works-in-progress to the wiki and refine them there- most students preferred to work privately and then put a final text into the wiki.

Collaboration Between Generations

I found the same to be true at my old law firm. In particular, the younger attorneys did not want interim drafts to be seen and were reluctant to contribute content. The more seasoned attorneys were more willing to edit and add information. The vast majority of article creation was limited to a small group.

In my view, younger team members are reluctant to produce content because they do not want to expose their lack of knowledge, they do not want to expose themselves for criticism and they have little grasp of the technology.

The lack of knowledge is true regardless of how you teach collaboration. It would seem silly to put the youngest members of the team in charge of the team’s knowledge and content production. They have the least understanding of the subject matter.

Dealing with Criticism

The criticism issue has two parts. On one side, I don’t think students are taught to collaborate. They go through school being graded on their individual performance. The few classes that grade as a team are outliers.

The second issue is the internal culture of  your company. Collaboration requires trust. You need to work as a team and avoid individual blame. It also requires sharing the credit for good work among the team. That is just how your company or group at the company operates. Technology does not change culture.

The Technology

As both Goldman and Villa point out, the technology is still a barrier. There are many inherent limitation in a wiki that you don’t have with Microsoft Word. I think the wiki markup language is a mistake. I think platforms should just use html based code.

Regardless of the underlying code, web-based documents do not have the rich formatting of Word. Arguably, you don’t need the vast majority of that formatting. It’s still very frustrating when something easy to do in Word is hard to do in a wiki.

Printing is another issue. In the end you may want to print hard copies. I have experienced widely different quality in what happens when a wiki page goes to the printer.

Wiki for One

I have to admit that I have not been preaching the benefits of 2.0 tools within my company. I use them purely as a knowledge tool for me. I use this blog and an internal wiki to store information for me to find as part of the compliance program. Most of the company is numbers driven, something for which web 2.0 tools are poorly suited.

I did collaborate with a summer intern on a compliance project using the wiki. I had the same experience as Goldman and Villa. Using a wiki did not come naturally to her. It took time for me to develop the trust for her to use it effectively.

In the end we worked together to create a tremendous amount of content for the compliance program that is well-organized and easy to find.

Other Examples

Over the last year I have seen an increase in the public use of Web 2.0 tools by compliance professionals. There has been a dramatic increase in the use of blogs. You can look at my blogroll for other examples.

One to take a close look at is Kathleen Edmond’s Blog. She publishes disciplinary examples from Best Buy. As you might expect, the examples do not include specific people or products. She is able to get the ethics story from Best Buy out into the public. She can get comments on her reasoning and the results.

Sources:

PBWorks and Real Time Collaboration

PBworks_LogoPBWorks has announced a “Real-time Collaboration Update”  which brings integrated Instant Messaging collaboration, Live Notifications (activity streams), Live Editing (rather than standard wiki asynchronous editing) and integrated Voice Collaboration with on-demand voice conferencing.

This is a big step up. Instead of being a  mere wiki, the platform now offers different ways to collaborate, but still captures the information in the platform. I assume that is one of the reasons they changed their name from PB Wiki to PB Works.

PB Wiki was the first wiki I ever used. A group used it to plan an international meeting of law firm knowledge management leaders. Now I regularly use the PB Works tools as part of GeekDad information management process.

While I was at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, I spent a few minutes with a bunch of people from PB Works: Jim Groff, the CEO;  Chris Yeh, Vice President, Marketing ; Glen Hoffman, Sales Engineer; Greg lelli, Legal Sales Specialist; and Kristine Molnar, Community Evangelist.

One of the drawbacks of a wiki was the check-in/check-out process. Only one person could edit a wiki page at a time. Google Docs (and to a lesser extent Google Wave) showed us that you can have multiple people editing at the same time and speed up the collaboration process even more.

The PB Works team gave me a demo of the new tools and it was pretty cool. If you are editing a page and realize that you need input of other team members, you can summon them to the page using IM Collaboration, start a Live Editing session, and use Voice Collaboration to initiate an instant conference call. You can do this all in a fraction of the time it would take to set up a web conference, the call line, and communicate the details to everyone.

Since PBworks hosts the  information, you can be up and running in a few minutes.

Who Knows What?

WSJ-who-knows-what

A nice piece in Monday’s Wall Street Journal on knowledge management: Who Knows What? Finding in-house experts isn’t easy. But most companies make it harder than it should be. The article, by  Dorit Nevo, Izak Benbasat and Yair Wand, explores the expertise location benefits of enterprise 2.0.

The authors describe the use of blogs, wikis, social networking and tagging as ways to collect and expose expertise with an enterprise”

“Every big company has in-house experts. So why don’t they use them more?

In-house experts, with their specialized knowledge and skills, could be invaluable to both colleagues and managers. But often workers who could use their help in other departments and locations don’t even know they exist.

Talk about a waste! Because of an inability to tap expertise, problems go unsolved, new ideas never get imagined, employees feel underutilized and underappreciated. These are things that no business can afford anytime—let alone in this tough economic climate. Which is why so-called expertise-locator systems have become a hot topic in corporate IT.

To date, most such systems are centrally managed efforts, and that’s a problem. The typical setup identifies and catalogs experts in a searchable directory or database that includes descriptions of the experts’ knowledge and experience, and sometimes links to samples of their work, such as research reports.

But there are gaping holes in this approach. For starters, big companies tend to be dynamic organizations, in a constant state of flux, and few commit the resources necessary to constantly review and update the credentials of often rapidly changing rolls of experts.

Second, users of these systems need more than a list of who knows what among employees. They also need to gauge the experts’ “softer” qualities, such as trustworthiness, communication skills and willingness to help. It isn’t easy for a centrally managed database to offer opinions in these areas without crossing delicate political and cultural boundaries.

The answer, we think, is to use social-computing tools.”

Missing from the online story link are some additional resources listed in the paper for further reading in the MIT Sloan Management Review (they sponsored the Business Insight section).

  • Six Myths About Informal Networks— and How to Overcome Them
    By Rob Cross, Nitin Nohria and Andrew Parker (Spring 2002)
    Informal groups of employees do much of the important work in companies today. To help those networks reach their potential, executives must understand how they function.
    http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/4337
  • Improving Capabilities Through Industry Peer Networks
    By Stoyan V. Sgourev and Ezra W. Zuckerman (Winter 2006)
    By sharing insights and perspectives with a group of noncompeting peers from other regions, managers can stay abreast of industry trends and combat complacency.
    http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/47210
  • Defining the Social Network of a Strategic Alliance
    By Michael D. Hutt, Edwin R. Stafford, Beth A. Walker and Peter H. Reingen (Winter 2000)
    Paying attention to personal relationships accelerates learning and increases the effectiveness of alliances.
    http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/4124
  • Creating Sustainable Local Enterprise Networks
    By David Wheeler, Kevin McKague, Jane Thomson, Rachel Davies, Jacqueline Medalye and Marina Prada (Fall 2005)
    In developing countries, examples of successful sustainable enterprise often involve informal networks that include businesses, nonprofit organizations and communities.
    http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/47109
  • Are You Networked for Successful Innovation?
    By Polly Rizova (Spring 2006)
    To manage research-and-development projects, companies need to ensure that informal social networks are reinforced—and not thwarted—by formal organizational structures.
    http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/47310

(I’m not sure why they left out Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration by Andrew P. McAfee, Spring 2006)

Another resource is this video of Jennifer Merritt from the Wall street Journal interviewing Dorit Nevo from the Schulich School of Business at York University.

Enterprise 2.0 at Goodwin Procter

goodwinprocter_logo

Can law firms jump on the Enterprise 2.0 bandwagon? Lawyers are generally seen as conservative users of technology, preferring to use a quill and inkwell over a web-based publishing platform. David Hobbie shares some of the successes he has encountered in the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 at Goodwin Procter (.pdf – page 13) in the June 2009 issue of KM Pro Journal (.pdf)

Goodwin Procter was one of the early adopters of collaboration and knowledge sharing tools and has begun adopting the internal use of blogs and wikis as tools. This is a great article, summarizing some of the theory behind Enterprise 2.0, comparing it to knowledge management, and giving practical uses of these tools in a legal environment.

“More knowledge has been captured and stored because communications have been opened up to more authors and have been moved out of email “silo” and into public spaces. More knowledge transfer has occurred because the Enterprise 2.o tools are built to communicate, whether through alerts of new information, easy browseability through user-created structure, or through better search.”

I had the pleasure of working with David at Goodwin Procter during the initial deployment of the tools. I am happy to see that they continue to grow and succeed. You can read more from David at his blog: Caselines.

Document Behaviors

A version of this post originally appeared in my old blog: KM Space.

I have been focusing a lot of attention on the behaviors towards documents. After all, a wiki page is just another type of document. When producing documents, I have noted five types of behaviors: collaborative, accretive, iterative, competitive and adversarial.

Collaborative
With collaborative behavior, there are multiple authors each with free reign to add content and edit existing content in a document, and they do so.

Accretive
With accretive behavior, authors add content, but rarely edit or update the existing content. Accretive behavior is seen more often in email than documents. Each response is added on top of the existing string of information with no one synthesizing the information in a coherent manner. I have seen this in wikis as well where people will add content but not edit others content.

Iterative
With iterative behavior, existing content is copied to a new document. The document stands on its own as a separate instance of content. The accretive behavior is distinguished from the iterative behavior by the grouping of similar content together. With accretive behavior the content is being added to the same document, effectively editing the document. With iterative behavior, the person creates a new document rather than adding to an existing document.

Competitive
With competitive document behavior, there is a single author who seeks comments and edits to the document as a way to improve the content. However, interim drafts and thoughts are kept from the commenters. The transmission of the content to a client or a more senior person inside the firm will result in a competitive behavior.

Adversarial
Adversarial behavior is where the authors are actually competing for changes to the content for their own benefit. Although there may be a common goal, the parties may be seeking different paths to that goal or even have different definitions of the goal.

Collaborative, accretive and iterative content production are largely internal behaviors. Competitive and adversarial are largely external document behaviors. Of course, a document may end up with any or all of these behaviors during its lifecycle.

I decided to re-post and update this based on Jordan Furlong’s The three types of collaboration on Law 21. Jordan set up three types of lawyer collaboration lawyer-to-lawyer, lawyer-to-client, and client-to-client. Read his post and let us know how you think we can mesh these two concepts together.

See also:

Federal Knowledge Management Working Group

fed_km_initiative_words_logo
The Federal Knowledge Management Working Group consists of over 700 Federal employees, contractors, academicians and interested members of the public who have mounted a campaign to enhance collaboration, knowledge and learning in the Federal Government by implementing formal knowledge management.

Neil Olonoff, who is the leader for the initiative looking at the formation of a Chief Knowledge Officer for the federal government, sent me note about this impressive initiative.

Mission: Inform and support federal government departments, agencies, organizations, and their constituencies in the research, development, identification, and implementation of knowledge management (KM) activities, practices, lessons learned, and technologies. To accomplish this mission, the Federal KMWG will mobilize and leverage thought leaders and KM practitioners from government, quasi-government, academia, non-government, nonprofit, and the private sector around the globe.

They have already putting together a tremendous wiki full of information at KM.gov (which redirects to http://wiki.nasa.gov/cm/wiki/?id=1926).

I recommend taking a look at the PowerPoint presentation they posted on knowledge management is important to the federal government: Federal Knowledge Management Initiative (PPT). There are some great ideas that are can be reused for your organization.

UPDATE:

Jeanne Holm is the elected chair of the Federal Management Working Group. In the original post, I had identified Neil Olonoff as the holder of that position. Jeanne sent me a nice note with the clarification. You can reach Jeanne on Twitter @Jeanne_JPL.

Five Things Every Legal Practice Should Know About 2.0

At the recent LegalTech conference, Lee Bryant and May Abraham presented on Web 2.0 tool inside law firms (a/k/a Enterprise 2.0).

Lee shares his thoughts on his Headshift blog:  Five Things Every Legal Practice Should Know About 2.0:

In the session, we tried to get across just how easy it is to find meaningful use cases for the use of social tools inside a law firm, and the great potential for cost and time savings they present. We touched on a few Headshift cases studies including Allen and Overy, who have been using social tools for informal knowledge sharing successfully for over three years, and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, whose wiki spaces have replaced an old intranet with increasing levels of traffic and participation. But we also looked at a classic DIY ‘mashup’ approach within the Australian firm Mallesons, who have built some fantastic applications using combinations of open source and other tools.

Mary shares her thoughts on her Above and Beyond KM blog: Tales From LegalTech: Five Things Every Legal Practice Should Know About Web 2.0:

One of the reasons I agreed to participate in this session was that I’ve begun to experience the benefits of social media in my knowledge management work and could see the great potential for its use more generally in a legal practice.  There are so many things lawyers do that require the participation of others — planning and organizing throughout a matter’s life cycle, discussions with clients and other lawyers, negotiations with counter-parties, drafting legal documents, closings, post-closing compliance and clean-up, etc.   What would happen if we could use Web 2.0 tools to shift these activities out of the current paradigm of  expensive face-to-face meetings,  ineffective conference calls held while all participants are multitasking, and asynchronous e-mail exchanges?  What would change?

There are many great uses for blogs, wikis and other 2.0 tools inside the firewall of your organization (even if it is not a law firm). These 2.0 tools are very useful from a compliance perspective.

They can be useful in drafting policies. A working group can use the wiki to collaborate in creating the initial draft of a policy. You can publish a draft policy in  a blog post and let the broader audience use the blog comment feature to provide input about the policy.

These 2.0 tools generally have great search features. They should make it easier for the people in your organization to find the relevant policy. Since you can embed links in the policies, you can link to other relevant policies. It also will enable a hub and spoke approach to policies, allowing you to cross-reference policies instead of repeating similar items in multiple policies.

Most of the concerns about web 2.0 (anonymity, nasty comments, etc.) go away when the audience is your coworkers. They are also easier to deploy and easier to use that traditional technology tools.

Mary is long-time friend from my days in knowledge management. I met Lee at the 2008 Enterprise 2. o Conference. (You can see my live blogging of Enterprise 2.0 on my old KM Space blog.) Both Mary and Lee have great insights about how these tools can help your organization.

Wikis and Document Management Systems

This post was originally published in my old blog: KM Space.

Versions of this article appeared as

Which Route?
KM Legal, Volume 2 Issue 4, June 2008 http://www.kmlegalmag.com/coverfeature
EI Case study: Wiki versus DMS at Goodwin Procter
Inside Knowledge, Volume 11 Issue 8
http://www.ikmagazine.com/

The document management system has long been the factory assembly line for most big law firms. In turn, the document management system becomes the largest searchable repository of knowledge in a law firm. With the rise of enterprise 2.0 technologies and their alignment with knowledge management, the question arises how these new technologies might affect the use of existing technologies, like the document management system. One of the most promising enterprise 2.0 technologies for knowledge management is the wiki.

Definition of a Wiki

At its core, a wiki is a collection of editable pages on the web. Each time a wiki page is edited and saved, a new version is created. Also, when the wiki page is saved, the wiki platform will send out a notification of the changes to subscribers to that wiki page. A typical feature of the wiki platform is that it is easy to compare changes between any two versions of a wiki page.

Wikipedia is the most famous wiki. Wikipedia.org is a web-based, free content encyclopedia project. This site is based on a wiki platform, open for anyone to add content or edit existing content. With over 9 million articles in more than 250 languages, and over 2.2 million articles in English alone, Wikipedia is several times larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica. One key step that Wikipedia took was to eliminate any requirement of registration to add or edit content. Anyone can anonymously edit wiki pages in Wikipedia. Rarely would a firm allow for anonymous editing of wiki used within the firm. Most wiki platforms deployed inside a firm’s firewall will allow a single sign-on so the editor is recognized from their initial sign-on to the network.

Wikis are attractive as a knowledge management tool because they it make very easy to contribute content and easy to find the content. Most wikis offer an easy to use “What You See Is What You Get” page editor that resembles a simple word-processing program. Since the wiki content is in the form of a web page most search engines can easily index and search the contents of the wiki.

Definition of a Document Management System

A document management system (DMS) is a computer system used to track and store electronic documents. Those electronic documents can include word-processing documents, presentations, scanned documents, spreadsheets and a variety of document formats.

A typical DMS will automatically tag the document with a specific reference identification. This identification allows for immediate retrieval of the document. The DMS will allow (or require) you to add metadata about the document. For law firms, that metadata will typically include a designation of the client and the particular matter for the client. This allows you to search for a document based on specific criteria about the document in addition to the text of the document.

The DMS will also allow you to add security to the document, so it can be private to the individual, limited to the matter team, limited to the client or to exclude specific people (as may be required for ethical purposes). The DMS allows you to store multiple versions of a particular document so that you can track the edits to the document.

A DMS succeeds because it offers more functionality than the user would have from saving the document to a standard drive. The DMS offers greater searching and categorization of documents. The unique identification marker on the document allows you to quickly identify the exact document in question. This identification is much shorter than the long file folder designation you would get from a file located on a standard drive. The DMS can also easily be tied into the word-processing software. In the end it easy to contribute to the DMS and easy to find content in the DMS.

DMS and Wikis at Goodwin Procter

Almost a decade ago at the beginning of my firm’s knowledge management group, one of the first action items was the selection of iManage (now Interwoven’s Worksite product) as the firm’s DMS. We now have over 8 million documents in the DMS. Nearly all of the documents produced by the lawyers and staff in the firm are stored in the DMS.

Our existing intranet is built on Microsoft’s SharePoint 2003 platform. A great deal of the content on the intranet is merely links to documents in the DMS. Users update content by opening and editing the content in the DMS. That shields them from the clunkier web editing and process on the existing intranet. It also allows them to use the version control features of the DMS to trace the history of the document and its content.Over the past year, we have been planning and implementing an upgrade of our intranet to Microsoft’s SharePoint 2007 platform. Wikis, blogs and some other enterprise 2.0 tools are included as part of SharePoint 2007 platform. At the outset of planning for our upgrade, we decided to actively use some of these tools to see how they worked. In particular, wikis caught our attention as a great tool for knowledge management within the firm. I used the free test version of PBWiki for a variety of projects: managing our knowledge management projects, co-authoring an article on social networking, planning a conference, managing transactions for a client, preparing and gathering the results of a survey of law firm knowledge management leaders, and gathering definitions of knowledge management.Comparison of Functionality

In comparing the features of a wiki and the features of a DMS, a wiki combines more of the features in the document production process into one package. A wiki has a basic word processing program, with a simple editor for creating content. The wiki has a flat list of wiki pages within the wiki platform. (Although some wiki platforms do allow for greater organization.) The wiki has the ability to compare changes between versions of a wiki page. The wiki has a notification process that alerts subscribers to the wiki page when changes or additions occur.

The wiki combines features of a word-processing program, a DMS, a document comparison program and an email program into one package. Of course, a wiki does not have all of the bells and whistles that these four programs do.

The strength of the DMS lies in it rich metadata collection, version control and security. Within a law firm, it is important to be able to retrieve all of the documents for a particular client or for a particular matter for a client. And perhaps even more important is the ability to apply security limitations to documents for a particular client or matter. For example, a document for public company merger would have security applied to limit viewing to the matter team in an effort to avoid the disclosure of the transaction.

Document Behaviors

A wiki and DMS are both focused on producing, storing and sharing content. A wiki page is just another type of document. When producing content, I have noted five types of behaviors: collaborative, accretive, iterative, competitive and adversarial. In a collaborative scenario, there are multiple authors each with free reign to add content and edit existing content in a document, and they do so. With accretive behavior, authors add content, but rarely edit or update the existing content. With iterative, there is single author controlling changes to the document. The document may have originated from another source, but stands on its own as a separate instance of content. With competitive content creation, there is a single author who seeks comments and edits to the document as a way to improve the content. However, interim drafts and thoughts are kept from the commenters. Adversarial behavior is where the authors are actually competing for changes to the content for their own benefit. Although there may be a common goal, the parties may be seeking different paths to that goal or even have different definitions of the goal.

Collaborative, accretive and iterative content production are largely internal behaviors. Competitive and adversarial are largely external document behaviors. Of course, a document may end up with any or all of these behaviors during its lifecycle.

Typical Behaviors With a DMS

The principal behavior for use of content in he DMS is iterative. Lawyers will search for and reuse existing content in a DMS. But rarely will they change an existing document. Generally, a document in the DMS was drafted for a particular issue for a particular client. They reuse existing content, but create a new iteration of that content. Lawyers will work collaboratively in drafting documents, but the process is iterative. They draft the document with some collaboration with their assistant in finalizing and editing the draft. The draft is circulated for comments. Then the lawyer creates a new iteration of the document as a new version of the document in the DMS. The lawyer then incorporates the changes they accept, finalize this new draft and circulate again.

The transmission of the content to a client or a more senior person inside the firm will result in a competitive behavior. A junior person will generally want to hide interim drafts and issues from the senior person. The junior person is looking to impress and move up in the firm. The same behavior is typical with a client. The client is expecting vetted, finished work for their review and comment. With a lawyer-client relationship there is the additional and important issue of liability for mistakes resulting in possible malpractice and personal liability for the lawyer.

Accretive behavior is seen more often in email than documents. Each response is added on top of the existing string of information with no one synthesizing the information in a coherent manner.

Typical Behaviors with a Wiki

I have seen two principal behaviors in using wikis. The first is accretive. With this behavior, the person will add content to the wiki, but not update or edit existing content. This is largely the learned behavior from email. The second behavior is collaborative, where the person will add content, but also edit existing content.

The accretive behavior is distinguished from the iterative behavior by the grouping of similar content together. With accretive behavior the content is being added to the same wiki page, effectively editing the document. With iterative behavior, the lawyer creates a new document rather than adding to an existing document.

When to Use a Document in the DMS

The traditional DMS process is best used when the production of content is adversarial, rather than collaborative. Generally all discussions between opposing counsel are adversarial, even in transactional law. With collaborative behavior in a typical wiki, there is no control over the addition or editing of content, other than responding to edits or locking the wiki page from editing. You give up the control of authoriship. Most of the bad behavior stories from wikipedia come from an adversarial editing process. A robust infrastructure has grown as part of wikipedia to deal with adversarial editing.

The DMS is the better repository for documents that enter a competitive or adversarial behavior. The lawyer will want a record of what was contained in each version of the document as the content was changed by the author.

When to Use a Wiki

The question is what content in the law firm should you “wiki-fy”?

Of the document behaviors, a wiki is an exceptional platform for collaborative treatment of documents. Ownership of the document is less important than the collection of the content into one synthesized place.

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.

I had some success using a wiki to manage the internal closing agendas for a client with several transactions occurring in the office at any one time. Instead of one person needing to control the edits, the entire client team can update any closing agenda at any time. When viewing the wiki page, it will always be the most up-to date location of information. As changes are made to an agenda, the wiki platforms sends out a notification of the change to the entire internal client team. The DMS behavior would be to maintain the closing agenda in a word-processing document. A single person would be responsible for keeping it up to date (usually the most junior person). After an edit or a group of edits, the author would email the updated agenda to the client team, who would then have to discern changes or eschew a version full of the marked changes. The wiki collapses the document process into a shorter series of steps and provides a richer flow of information.

Wiki While You Work

As law firms begin implementing wikis, they will need to identify the best way to use this new tool. Wikis can simplify the production of content by reducing the number of programs and the steps needed to produce the content. Although they are not appropriate for all types of content, they are an excellent tool to add to your knowledge management program.