I have written about wikis (See my posts of Dec. 9, 2005 about Cornell’s legal wiki and Feb. 12, 2006 that predicts wikis between law departments.), but they are only one sibling of so-called social network software. What you are reading is part of the family as are content-sharing sites like del.icio.us and Flickr, in the eyes of Information Week, Feb. 27, 2006 at 52.
Let’s stay with wikis. A law department that has several lawyers who handle similar issues, such as FERC lawyers who do rate cases, should experiment with a wiki, a web site that can be edited by anybody’s who’s granted permission. Inexpensive, easy to use, flexible, intuitively useful, and excellent at sharing knowledge, an in-house wiki is a platform for training, quality control, increased productivity, and knowledge management. Wikis are available as open-source software (such as Quickiwiki and Tikiwiki) and as licensed (such as Socialtext) (See my posts Jan. 24, 2006 about the half-life of law department knowledge; July 14, 2005 about knowledge coaches; and June 12, 2005 about how to minimize losses from retirements.)