You’ve got to help me out folks! Sometimes it feels like I’ve been a voice crying in the wilderness, telling the good news of Enterprise 2.0 to anyone in the law firm world that will listen. The problem is that we’re not seeing a whole lot of law firm adoption success stories.
Why? Are law firms keeping quiet about their progress in order to protect their competitive edge? Or are they quiet because there isn’t much to talk about. If it’s the former, just send me a message on the QT letting me know that good things are happening. Then I’ll just wait patiently for your official press release before blogging about it. If it’s the latter, can someone please tell me why?
In fairness, lawyers may not be all that different than people in other industries. A vendor recently observed that while there is a lot of E2.0 hype generally, success (in his view) seems to be sporadic, localized and shallow rather than persistent, widespread and deep. Again I ask, why?
I’m spending this week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. While I’m sure the vendor announcements will be interesting, I’m primarily interested in learning why adoption seems to be slow and what we can do about it. Stay tuned.
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For those of you who love contests, PBworks is sponsoring the The Enterprise 2.0 Players Deck. I was pleasantly surprised to find my name among the E2.0 bloggers. If you’d like to help out (and you have a Twitter account), please vote.
[Photo Credit: David Gallagher]
Above and Beyond KM 
I recently attended a workshop for attorneys, risk managers, human resource executives and business communicators to discuss social media/networking. Perspectives from each segment were predictable: attorneys interested but guarded and in neutral; risk managers looking to protect against perils; HR pushing for policies and training; communicators full steam ahead. While the event was not E2.0, there may be some parallels in perspective.At the end of the event, I spoke with a Harvard Law grad who shared that he is in a group that meets monthly to “study business issues like social media so we can figure out what we should do in our firm.” I think there is a lot of caution not only in law firms, but also in area such as financial service and IP rich tech firms.I too am very interested in adoption rates and look forward to hearing what you learn and hearing from others as well.
Thanks, Chuck. This is an evolving area. Hopefully there will be good news to report soon.- MaryVMaryAbrahamAboveandBeyondKM.com