Hans Albers, Cisco’s Director of Legal Systems for the US and Canada, describes his department’s legal information platform in Law Dept. Quarterly, Vol. 2, May-July 2006 at 28. Any Cisco lawyer can post a question or start a “conversation,” and any other lawyer can post replies offering information and ideas. The system is indexed so Cisco lawyers “can look up all the conversations on certain themes, almost like an internal searchable blog.”
If the system has robust searching capabilities (See my post of Feb. 19, 2006 on advanced searching techniques such as by concepts.), it could help immeasurably. It sounds fairly easy to use, doesn’t take much time, and has both immediate and longer-term payback for all. What would be nice would be to have some usage metrics from the 150-lawyer department.