Marketing and technology: value at the intersection of communication & collaboration.

• Author: Lippe, Paul

When I graduated law school in 1984, no one foresaw that lawyers would someday be spending so much time using email that jokes about "Crack-berry" addiction. In fact, when I was a general counsel in the early '90s, most firms declined our request to start using email, citing a rotating set of reasons from concerns about security to questions like: "What is email?" and "How can we charge for it?"

E-discovery itself is a booming sub-industry. As we approach 2011, it's pretty clear that the dominant mode of communication is shifting from email to social networking or 'Web 2.0 Collaboration,' a mix of profiles, searches, databases, document management, pictures, blogs, wikis, tweets, tags, extranets and who knows what else (some of these are even secure networks that allow a mix of confidential/privileged and non-confidential/non-privileged communication.) If you're a college student, a sales exec, a software engineer or an online media whiz, you've probably already made this shift; if you're a lawyer, it is more likely that you're just beginning.

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But that's not true of all lawyers. InsideCounsel magazine just recognized Cisco Systems' legal department as "Making Connections" because of the way Cisco uses Web 2.0 technology to collaborate internally and with outside firms. www.insidecounsel.com/Issues/2010/September/ Documents/IC10.pdf.

Collaboration is nothing new, and it's not some "Kumbaya" thing--it's how Lennon and McCartney wrote songs, how Hamilton and Madison wrote The Constitution, how the Oxford English Dictionary and Wikipedia (and, unless you're a literalist, the Bible) were created. Collaboration is also how lawyers manage a big financing or synch up their briefs in multi-jurisdictional litigation.

According to Cisco's Legal Department Head of Knowledge Management Risa Schwartz, "Our vision is... to access in radiating circles the institutional knowledge of the legal department, its internal customers, its outside counsel and peer legal departments... It's going to change the way we do business."

So what does this mean for legal marketing? It means that communications, which has always been the bread and butter of legal marketing, is being upgraded from a supporting role to the starring role. Let me suggest that for the next few years, there's only one question legal marketers should worry about: "Will my lawyers and my firm be in clients' radiating circles, whether to deliver work of higher value, or so...