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Corporate blogs for law firm internal communications

November 19, 2004

In addition to using blogs for marketing purposes, we’re going to see innovative law firms begin to use blogs for internal communications, ala an effective and inexpensive intranet. Sure, the vast majority of law firms and their IT departments will dismiss blog software that could be set up for a few thousand dollars in favor of terribly expensive intranet and related software. But look at what the innovators are doing.

The Industry Standard reported today “Google Inc., which implemented an internal Web log system behind its firewall about 18 months ago, has seen tremendous benefits from it and may in the future consider providing tools and expertise for this purpose to interested clients.” Jason Goldman, Blogger product manager at Google, told the Standard Google staffers have found many useful and creative ways for the internal blog.

Goldman told of the following blog uses by Google:

  • People keeping track of meeting notes
  • People sharing diagnostics information
  • People sharing snippets of code
  • More personal uses, like letting co-workers know what they’re thinking about and what they’re up
  • Helping grow the intranet and the internal base of documents

Google’s blog is entitled Google (BIG) and set up on Blogger, which is owned by Google. Here’s a screenshot of a BIG page from last year.

Allen Weiner, a Gartner Inc. analyst sums it up best for the Standard:

  • What is undeniable is that there is a growing interest among businesses towards blogs as business communication tools, particularly among IT departments. The mandate of IT organizations today is to do more with less, so the better they can communicate and share things, the more efficient their operations will be. There’s a huge benefit in blogging for companies implementing IT projects. It’s going to be a growing trend over the next couple of years.
  • We set up lots of blogs at lexBlog. There’s no doubt a blog behind a firewall with multiple authors who can post entries, exchange comments and store documents can be a heck of a knowledge sharing tool. They can be set up quickly without IT support, at low cost and on various topics or projects. I got to believe innovative law firms are going to use corporate blogs soon, if some are not already doing do so.

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