Creating a Culture of Collaboration

• Author: Dennis Kennedy - Tom Mighell
• Pages: 271-277

271

Creating a Culture of

Collaboration

While this book has emphasized the technologies and tools

that lawyers and those who work with lawyers can use to

collaborate, selecting the right tools alone does not guarantee

that a collaboration effort will be successful. Collaboration is

a profoundly human endeavor. The success of collaboration

depends primarily on the actual ways people work together.

The human and cultural behavior between the collaborators

will drive, dictate, and ultimately determine the success of

your collaboration projects. If you ignore or downplay the

human factors, you are setting up your project for failure.

A Closer Look at Collaboration

Collaboration takes place at the intersection of the individual

efforts of the people involved. At the same intersection will be

several different cultures, depending on the particular indi-

viduals. The cultures may mesh well with each other, or they

may react poorly and refuse to mix at all. In most cases, the

collaborators end up somewhere in between the two extremes.

Collaboration tool implementation will be most successful

when it takes place in a culture that already accepts collabora-

tion, when the tool is introduced with respect for the existing

culture. If a spirit of collaboration does not already thrive

in the culture of an organization or between organizations,

more work will be necessary to encourage collaboration. If

the tools you introduce do not reflect and respect the existing

collaboration patterns of a firm or company, you may run into

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