Doug Cornelius .com

With the summer associates coming soon, The Firm has been wondering what to do with Facebook. Last summer, the summer associates created their own Facebook group. The Firm’s recruiting department was wondering whether to create the Facebook Group for the 2008 group ahead of time.

Of course, I was a big advocate of setting up the Facebook group. That way the summer associates could start connecting with each other before they arrived at The Firm. Also, it would send them the message, that their online personas and activities need to get cleaned-up (if necessary).

They also spent some time researching Facebook to see what other large law firm groups are in Facebook. Here are the results. It starts with the firm name, then lists the groups found with the firm name. Under each group is the target audience of the group, whether it is opened or closed and who created the group.

Arnold & Porter
Arnold & Porter – Summer Klass of Summer 2k7
07 SA Open Student

Baker Botts
Baker Botts (Washington)
STAFF Open STAFF
Baker Botts DC Summer Associates 2008
08 SA (DC) Closed Student

Bingham McCutchen
Bingham McCutchen
STAFF Open STAFF

Cravath
Cravath Summer Associate Class of 2007
07 SA Closed Students

Davis Polk
Davis Polk 2008 Summer Associates
08 SA (NY) Closed Student
Davis Polk & Wardwell
STAFF Open STAFF

Debevoise
Debevoise & Plimpton Summer 2008
08 SA (NY) Open Student
Debevoise & Plimpton LLP
STAFF Open STAFF
Debevoise Summer ’07
07 SA (NY) Open Student

Dechert
Dechert Philadelphia Summer Associates ’07
07 SA (PA) Closed Students
Dechert LLP London Future Trainees
London Closed UNK
Dechert Trainees
08 London Closed UNK

Gibson Dunn
Gibson Dunn Summer 2008
08 SA (LA) Open UNK
Gibson Dunn & Crutcher (NYC) Summer Associates 2008
08 SA (NY) Open Student
Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP
STAFF Open STAFF

Goodwin Procter
Goodwin Procter
Staff Closed Staff
2007 Goodwin Procter Summer Associates
07 SA (all) Closed Student

Hogan & Hartson
Hogan & Hartson Summer Associates 2008
08 SA (DC) Open Student
Hogan & Hartson NY Summer 2008
08 SA (NY) Closed Student
Hogan & Hartson Summer Associates 2007 – DC
07 SA (DC) Open Student

Heller Ehrman
2007 Heller Ehrman Summer Associates
07 SA (NY) Closed Student
Heller Ehrman LLP
STAFF Open STAFF

Kirkland & Ellis
Kirkland & Ellis LA – Summer ’08
08 SA (LA) Closed Students
Kirkland & Ellis Intake 2009
STAFF Open STAFF

Latham & Watkins
Latham & Watkins New York Summer Associates 2007
07 SA (NY) Closed Student
Latham & Watkins Trainees-to-be
London Closed Student
Latham & Watkins LLP
STAFF Open STAFF
Latham & Watkins 2007
London Closed UNK

Paul Hastings
Paul Hastings Summer ’08
08 SA Open Student
Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP
STAFF Open STAFF

Paul Weiss
Paul Weiss 2007 NY Summer Associates
07 SA NY Open Student
Paul Weiss 2008 NY Summer Associates
08 SA (NY) Open UNK
Paul, Weiss Summer Associates 2008*
08 SA (NY) Open Student

Proskauer
Proskauer Rose Summer 2008
08 SA Open UNK
Proskauer Produces Results: Summer ’06
06 SA Open Student

Ropes & Gray
Ropes & Gray, Summer Associates 2008
08 SA (Boston) Open Student
Ropes & Gray NYC 2008
08 SA (NY) Open Student
Ropes & Gray NYC Summers
07 SA (NY) Open Student

Sidley
Sidley Chicago 07
07 SA (Chicago) Closed Student
The Sidley Squad
Interns Closed Student

Simpson Thatcher
Simpson Thacher 2007 Summer Associates
07 SA (ALL) Open UNK
Simpson Thacher 2008 Summer Associates
08 SA (NY) Open Student

Skadden
Skadden NY Summer ’07
07 SA (NY) Closed Student
Skadden Alumni STAFF
ALUMS Open STAFF
Skadden, LA – Summer Associates 2007
07 SA (LA) Closed Student
Skadden DC – Summer 2007
07 SA (DC) Open Student
Skadden Summer Students 07
07 SA (ALL) Open Student
Skadden HK Summer ’07
07 SA (HK) Open Student
Skadden LA Summer 08
08 SA (LA) Open Student
Skadden Trainees 2008
STAFF Closed STAFF
Incoming Skadden LA Attorneys
STAFF Closed Student

Sullivan and Cromwell
Sullivan & Cromwell’s 2008 Summer Associates
08 SA Open UNK
Sullivan & Cromwell
STAFF Open STAFF

Weil Gotshal
Weil Gotshal Summer 08
08 SA (NY) Closed Student
2007 Weil Gotshal Summer Associates
07 SA (NY) Open Student
2006 Weil Gotshal Summer Associates
06 SA (NY) Open Student
Weil, Gotshal & Manges
STAFF Closed STAFF

Wilmerhale
WilmerHale Boston Summers, 2007
07 SA (Boston) Closed Students

Thanks the Recruiting Department at The Firm for doing this research.

My buddy Mary Abraham started a blog: Above and Beyond KM, a discussion of knowledge management that goes above and beyond technology. Mary has often been a rudder keeping our knowledge management groups focused on knowledge management and not on the technology.

Mary and I were recently sparring over whether lawyers are good at sharing knowledge. Being at a big law firm, I see lots of sharing. Senior lawyers must share with the junior lawyers on their team if they want the junior lawyers to get anything done. I see lots of requests for information in emails. (Unfortunately, I rarely see the responses. More on that below.)

Sharing happens in the law firm at several levels: between a junior lawyer and their mentor, among peers, within a matter team, within a client team, within a practice, and across the firm. I believe the most effective sharing is the sharing among smaller groups. So, I see much more sharing within the matter team than within a client team. It is just human nature and the nature of sharing.

But, I am firm believer that we are missing some technology tools to make sharing easier and more effective. We need better tools for the small groups to share their information within the group, but also allow the entire firm to access that sharing.

Unfortunately, the default way of sharing in a law firm is by email. I long lost count of the requests to better capture email to share the knowledge and information in the email. The problem is not sharing the email; the problem is the email itself. It is just not a good way to share.

That is why I am so excited about Enterprise 2.0 tools. They combine the communication power of email with the sharing and finding powers of the web. In particular, blogs and wikis make it very easy to share information and do so in a way that it seems very close and focused on what the smaller group is doing. But, all of that information in the blog or wiki is easily findable and useable by others in the firm who are not part of the smaller group.

One of the enticing features of Enterprise RSS is the ability to make enterprise communication more effective. Ten years ago, enterprise communication happened face-to-face, by phone and paper memos. Now, email is the default way of communicating within the enterprise.

Take a look at your email inbox. If your inbox looks anything like my inbox, it is full of email from the administrative departments transmitting updated policies, events and information. Almost none of these emails are urgent or require me to take any action. So why are they clogging up my inbox, getting in the way of client communication and urgent communication? Are these internal communications reasonably findable anywhere except my inbox? If not, what happens to the person who joins the firm tomorrow?

It would be better if that information was posted to a website so that everyone in the firm could find that information. (And find it the same way and in the same place.) For that posting to be an effective communication to the firm or a subset of the firm, you still need a way to push that information out to the firm or at least make them aware the new information. You can’t rely on each individual in the firm setting up their own RSS feedreader and subscribing to the feeds for this information.

That is where Enterprise RSS fits into the picture. Feedreaders are installed at the firm level, making RSS information feeds available to everyone in the firm through a variety of tools. You can view the RSS information feeds in your email program, a dedicated feedreader, the intranet or even your blackberry. With Enterprise RSS, you can also force subscriptions on people. So everyone gets the human resources updates, memos from the managing partner, etc.

Take some time to read about and learn about Enterprise RSS today, the Enterprise RSS Day of Action:

• Enterprise RSS Day of Action Website
• Attensa’s Enterprise RSS Product
• NewsGator’s Enteprise RSS Product
• Other Posts on The Enterprise RSS Day of Action
• Listen to this great podcast with James Dellow of Chieftech and Matt Moore of Engineers without Fears: podcast – james dellow – enterprise rss action day
• NewsGator’s collection of webinars on Enterprise RSS

A big thanks to James Dellow of Chieftech for organizing this information about Enterprise RSS and organizing the Enterprise RSS Day of Action.

I watched a webinar on 2.0 communities. This was a preview of a presentation scheduled for the Community 2.0 Conference.

Speakers:
Sylvia Marino, Director of Community Operations
Edmunds.com Inc.

Kathleen Gilroy, CEO
Swift Media Networks

The speakers advocate the development and deployment of communities wrapped around user generated content.

Their pitch was to create a playbook for the community development. They set up a wiki on PBwiki to host the playbook: community20bootcamp.pbwiki.com (it was public).

Their first example was ravelry.com, a site for the knitting community. One interesting tactic of this site was to blend in other 2.0 sites. Instead having knitters post the pictures of their knitting on ravelry.com, they post them to flickr. Ravelry.com then uses the flickr API to pull the pictures into ravelry.com.

Their second example was the TheDailyPlate.com, a site for helping you to eat smarter. The site gives you functionality by tracking your eating and activity during the day. Users are contributing information on calories burned during exercise and the nutrition information for food. (I will have to check back to this site if I am ever going to lose by baby weight.)

They shared an interesting story about tags. Apparently one of the most popular tags in flickr is “me.” That is the way we think about the pictures and relationships.

The target of the webinar was clearly on public websites. I was hoping to pick up some ideas for creating communities inside the enterprise. I am interested about integrating some internal websites into our intranet to enrich the content. Now, I do have a few more ideas.

The Enterprise RSS Day of Action is April 24.

I consider RSS to be the glue that holds together Web 2.0 and especially Enterprise 2.0. Blogs and wikis are great tools. But they are even more powerful when they are pushing content out through RSS feeds. It is much more efficient to have relevant content pushed to you, rather than you having to seek it out.

I previously posted on knowledge as an artifact and a flow. RSS is the flow. Enterprise RSS is the flow for the enterprise.

Of the 2.0 technologies, RSS is the least recognized. Most people recognize blogs, wikis and social networking sites. Tagging like del.icio.us tends to fall down on the list. But most studies I have read put RSS way down at the bottom for recognition and use. Enterprise RSS falls even father down the list.

Enterprise RSS is the key tool that would turn a collection of blogs and wikis into communication tools. To much internal communication happens by email. As a result, your email inbox becomes an information warehouse. That email does no good to the person who starts at the firm the next day. The knowledge is lost to that person.

Lots of internal communication could be better handled by using a blog, wiki or similar tool to host the information. As new information is added, the subscribers get the notification of the change and the content. The big plus is that the content is on a platform that should be easily indexed and retrievable by a search engine.

To really make this work well, you need to force subscriptions on people. That is the keystone to Enterprise RSS.

To learn more about Enterprise RSS:

• Listen to this great podcast with James Dellow of Chieftech and Matt Moore of Engineers without Fears: podcast – james dellow – enterprise rss action day
• Enterprise Day of Action Wiki
• Attensa an Enterprise RSS vendor
• NewsGator an Enterprise RSS vendor

At the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, I will be sitting on a panel with Jessica Lipnack, Bill Ives, Patti Anklam and Cesar Brea.

What Blogging Brings to Business

Blogs are powerful communication platforms that allow you to capture information you find interesting and to share it with an “audience” who can talk back to you. This panel of five business bloggers with a combined blogging lifetime of 19 years has generated business, communicated the concerns of its customers, experimented, and broken new ground through their blogs. Topics we’ll cover include: Blogging as knowledge management, Blogging as a conversation, Blogging for “fame and fortune”, Blogging as a platform for experimentation, and Blogging to reduce internal spam. Come join us to share your experiences and have the chance to speak at length with experienced bloggers.

Come join us at the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

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.”

I have been a sporadic user of Twitter. I was first drawn into using it when I noticed that Twitter is easily setup to change your status in Facebook.

Twitter continues to intrigue me. I have exchanged some great tweets over the past few weeks. The synchronous nature of Twitter often throws me off. I jump into a twitter and see that something interesting happened hours ago and the participants have since signed off. But I have had some Twitter Moments. (A phrase I attributed to Ray Sims.)

I like the lightweight and easily digestible aspect of Twitter. One new thing I heard about from Luis Suarez is the ability to create a TweetCloud. It creates a tag cloud based on the words you use in Twitter. This is my TweetCloud:

I am not sure if it is useful, but I find it very interesting. Sometimes “interesting” is enough.

If you sign up for Twitter, I am @dougcornelius

One of the quirky Massachusetts holidays is Patriot’s Day. It is a state-wide holiday to celebrate the Battles of Lexington and Concord. (For those of you who forget high school history, that was the “shot heard ’round the world” to start the American Revolutionary War.)

Patriot’s Day is also the day of the Boston Marathon. For the past fifteen years I have lived in a few different places, but all within a mile of the marathon route. Today was a beautiful day and I was able to get a few photos:

UPDATE: Doug’s Boston Marathon Photo Album on Picasa

Darren Rowse pointed me to the Zen of Blogging by Hunter Nuttall.

Photo by Clearly Ambiguous

It starts: They say that when the student is ready, the master will appear. One day I felt ready, and I began the long climb to the top of Mount Blogmore. Was the legend true? Did the old man really exist? No one knew for sure, but we knew that every aspiring blogger had felt compelled to seek him out when their time had come. We also knew they were never seen again. And so I climbed Mount Blogmore, with a strange force pulling me to the summit even though my knees quivered with fear. It wasn’t my choice, it was my destiny. I had to know if I had it in me. I had to know if my inner blogger was ready to be awakened. And ends: There is no blog! A blog has no inherent value; it’s just a medium for conveying value from one person to others.