Law Department Management Blog
Danette Galletin, the law department administrator at The Williams Companies, sketched at Mitratech’s Interact some things that department has done to accumulate and disseminate knowledge. One is to start a law department blog, which they use mostly to post communications to the group of 70 lawyers and 31 support staff. Another is the template library which contains best-practice forms that a group picked. Lawyers are not required to use the forms but they are a resource.
As a third tool Galletin added that the Williams law department hosts a wiki. The way she described it made it seem like an intranet site that anyone can add to fairly easily. It has all sorts of pages that have accumulated knowledge. Some are links to law firms the company uses; others to useful blogs; some have annotated agreements; a portion is devoted to Legal Aid; and others house all manner of nuts and bolts about how to do something.
Each page (subject) has a moderator and they use garden gnomes as a motif: everyone has to tend it for the knowledge garden to flourish. They thank solid contributors with a “Gnome of the Month” award. There’s no place like gnome!