Slack

• Author: Dennis Kennedy - Tom Mighell
• Pages: 177-186

177

Slack

In the first edition of this book, this chapter was devoted to

one of the hot collaboration tools of the day: the wiki. We

loved the prospect of the “web page you can edit,” and pre-

dicted it would become a popular addition to the law firm’s

collaboration toolkit. Fast-forward ten years, and the wiki is

still around—Wikipedia is one of the largest sources of knowl-

edge on the Internet—but it never really gained traction in the

law practice.

So in this edition, we focus instead on the new hot collab-

oration tool of the day, Slack. Initially released in 2013, Slack

began to gain real popularity in the past few years, within

companies and groups who wanted to find a different way of

communicating with each other. One of the reasons we wanted

to feature Slack is that we both use it for several purposes that

we’ll discuss later. In this chapter, we’ll talk about the basics

of Slack and some of its competitors, why legal professionals

should care, and how you might use Slack in your practice.

What Is Slack, and Why Should I Care?

At its heart, Slack is simply a messaging tool. When you first

open Slack, it might look a lot like an instant messaging program

like Skype—which it is. Slack’s designers initially designed the

program to address communication challenges among their soft-

ware development team, challenges that email either held up or

couldn’t solve. Slack is not designed to replace email, although

once you use it, you might be tempted to do so. Instead, Slack is

meant to complement email, in the way that instant messaging

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