practicehacker

The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies:
Smart Ways to Work Together

“Law practice is, has been, and will continue to be a collaborative process”
Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighelle

Summary: The Lawyer’s Guide offers a solid list of resources for lawyers seeking to collaborate. It is practically jargon-free as well, and frames its discussions with a look at the past before discussing more modern modes of collaboration. The book is also a great introduction to technology for lawyers of a certain age (i.e. Baby Boomers), although younger lawyers may find it to be a little too basic.

The Good: The authors of The Lawyer’s Guide display sensitivity to attorneys who came of age before the Internet was pervasive, and they do it without over-explaining or being too didactic.

The Bad: The authors do their best to treat the products attorneys have been using for decades, such as Microsoft Office programs, as collaboration tools. By today’s standards these programs are more likely to obstruct collaboration than to enable it. In the age of Twitter, Wikis, Zoho, SaaS, and Google Wave, they are part of the problem, not the solution.

The Ugly: As I read The Lawyer’s Guide I kept asking myself why the authors didn’t treat technology-enabled collaboration as a smart way to business instead of like the Rubic’s Cube of law practice (perplexing, complex, exasperating). It really isn’t that hard.

Evaluation: Keeping in mind what the books sets out to do, I give The Lawyer’s Guide a hearty endorsement and 4 hacks out of 5. In places it is a bit too basic but overall you can’t go wrong giving this book a read – either because you are a lawyer of a certain age or because you work for one.

“The practice of law is, has been, and will continue to be a collaborative process” according to Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell, authors of The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together. True enough. And collaboration in the Internet Age is not what it used to be. In their book, Dennis and Tom have compiled a guide for lawyers who want to keep up with current tools and methods of collaboration that take advantage of the technology. For example the book discusses

• Document collaboration in a lawsuit
• Internet meetings and file-sharing
• E-mail productivity including GTD
• An overview of the Web 2.0 phenomenon
• Strategic planning using technology

With an-easy-to read-format, short chapters, and full glossary and index, in addition to a complete list of tools and resources, The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies is exactly what it claims to be.

Just got my invitation to Google Wave. Should be called Google Crack. I’ve been online for 5 hours and still want to experiment but I’m about to pass out. To put it in perspective, I heard about the invitation at 8:30 Friday night. It is now 6:40 Saturday morning. I’ve been tooling around with Wave since 2:45 AM (didn’t sleep last night, okay?).

Turns out that Wave isn’t that complex (despite appearances). The most apt description I’ve heard yet was offered on Bwana.tv where the host referred to it as an open-sourced real-time multimedia platform for communication …. that just happens to draw on nearly all Google’s media properties – e-mail (gmail), video (YouTube), games, pictures (Picasa), IM (gTalk), social networking (Orkut), documents (Google Docs), real-time online collaboration (Google Docs again), etc.

The  point is his tool could really, really change the way we communicate with each other and with clients. It’s that useful. I’ll keep my readers up to date. So far so good.

P.S. In true Internet, word-of-mouth, hacker fashion I got my invitation through a longtime online contact I originally met blogging, who got it from a contact of his, and so on.  You could say we scarcely know one another but he helped me become part of the 100,000 who got Wave invites. Thanks for that bro!

Wave is Google’s open-sourced real-time multimedia platform for communications, combining e-mail (gmail), video (YouTube), pictures (Picasa), IM (gTalk), social networking (Orkut), and real-time online collaboration (Google Docs).