Doug Cornelius .com

The Bar Talk piece in the May 2008 edition of The American Lawyer is focused on Legal OnRamp. To toot my own horn, Brian Baxter, the author of the piece threw in a few quotes from me:

“Social networking costs are minimal-it’s not like sponsoring a table at an awards dinner or printing brochures-so your return on investment is astronomic,” says Douglas Cornelius, a senior real estate associate with Goodwin Procter in Boston. Cornelius says he favors Legal OnRamp over other business networking sites like LinkedIn and LawLink because it’s interactive and offers access to potential clients through its in-house contacts. Cornelius’s one gripe with the site so far is that it has too many Silicon Valley types.

The second half of my gripe (which did not make it into the story) was that there were few real estate and real estate investment management in-house contacts in Legal OnRamp. After all that is my client base.

As I have written about Metcalfe’s Law before, the power of a social network tool or communications tool is increased as more people use the tool. If my client base and peers are not using the tool, it is a less effective tool.

But wearing my knowledge management/enterprise 2.0 hat, Legal OnRamp is a tremendous tool. Even if your clients are not the “Silicon Valley types.”

Since the time of my interview by Brian Baxter, I have seen more and more real estate counsel come into Legal OnRamp. It is becoming more and more useful to me. I would bet that it will become more and more useful to my clients and potential clients.

Mostly to toot my own horn, there is a piece by Andrew Conry-Murray in Information Week: Holy Web 2.0 Herding Nightmare. I am not a big fan of the title; it makes Web 2.0 sound scary. I am fond of the subtitle: Do today’s new collaboration tools make it harder for IT to wrangle corporate information, or easier? YES.

“Web 2.0 collaboration tools are irresistible to end users: They’re easy to set up and use and can be accessed from anywhere. Employees can upload or create documents, spreadsheets, wikis, and blogs, then invite co-workers and partners to access, edit, and download content. . . . Departments and business units can provision users in minutes, pay with discretionary funds–and never make a single call to IT.”

If you read the story, you will pick up a few quotes from me. If you do not want to read the story, here are my quotes:

Doug Cornelius, a lawyer at [The Firm], relies on PBwiki, a popular provider of online collaboration tools, for a variety of projects. As a member of the law firm’s knowledge management department, Cornelius uses the wiki to manage meetings and agendas and to plan conferences. “It’s tremendous for capturing information,” he says. “Instead of a string of e-mails, you just go in and edit the wiki.”

While the firm also uses SharePoint as an intranet platform, Cornelius wanted to experiment with other options. “We didn’t need anyone from IT to do anything. Training and setup took 30 seconds,” he says. After a year of use, the wiki has more than 100 pages and gets several edits every day. Other departments in the firm are also using the PBwiki service.

“It’s a classic story of enterprise 2.0,” says [The Firm]‘s Cornelius. “We’re up and running with PBwiki in 30 seconds, and SharePoint is taking a year.”