The greatest resource: how online crowd-sourcing could unlock huge benefits for in-house teams

Anyone with responsibility for looking after small children in either a personal or professional capacity will know that life becomes easier for both the carer and the child once they learn how to share, in particular how to ‘share nicely’. Eventually this develops into a desire to swap as well as share. I currently observe this with my own children’s obsession in trading Match Attax cards (other brands of football cards or stickers are available).

And heading straight into the lazy, simplistic, but true analogy, life is easier for lawyers, too, when we share with each other.

I know a partner who told me he’d moved law firms because in part he was fed up with the eat-what-you-kill mentality of his old firm. Or, in schoolboy terms, his partners were not sharing nicely. Which is a shame, because an advantage that Big Law has over in-house is the ability to share knowledge on a largescale. Big Law has professional support lawyers; vertical industry specialists of all flavours; online precedent banks covering all areas one can imagine; and hundreds of years of combined legal experience on the shop floor. The best firms even have onsite dry-cleaning pick-up and return services.

In-house has: thinly-stretched transactional and contract lawyers who have to professionally support themselves; precedents that support the company’s core business but probably do not cater for much outside of the core franchise requirements; and, for everything else, a tendency to turn to PLC. We can’t afford to dry-clean our shirts in-house (cue sympathy), so the lack of that service isn’t a problem.

My legal team subscribes to PLC and I think it’s a pretty decent resource, otherwise we wouldn’t pay for it. But there is a resource that’s even better: it’s called talking to people – networking, sharing or, to use a buzzword, crowd-sourcing.

I’m not a frequent participant on the legal conference circuit, but I will generally go along to one or two a year that focus on in-house lawyers. I go because these give me what day-to-day in-house lawyering cannot: the opportunity to speak to lawyers working across different sectors. The chance to stress-test ideas with peers. To hear what issues others are facing. To understand how they are dealing with those issues. For reassurance. For a nudge that maybe there’s something I haven’t focused on which someone else has and which I ought to.

In-housers are generally good at sharing. There is no competitive background to our conversations (at least when we’re talking across sectors) and at the same time there is an unspoken trust. It has the potential to be a very powerful network. Maybe this is underplaying it – perhaps it already is powerful. But it certainly has the potential to be far more powerful. I believe that in-house lawyers can leverage the power of crowd-sourcing to a far greater degree than we currently do, even to the extent of being able to completely change the legal landscape in information and knowledge management if we want to and get ourselves organised.

As a lawyer working in the media sector, I make no apology for drawing an analogy from the media to make my point and recommend the article Time for a Press Award for Crowdsourced Journalism? on The Guardian’s digital content blog. It highlights how the media has used crowd-sourcing with its readership to help reveal police involvement in the death of Ian Tomlinson and also in the investigation of MPs’ expenses. Very impressive stuff.

I believe that there is scope for large, scaleable and technology-driven crowd-sourcing within the in-house community to help us move beyond the conference networking circuit and staple in-office diet of PLC. Indeed, the first formulaic signs of legal crowd-sourcing are visible even now. Here are three examples:

• www.quora.com – this website describes itself as “a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited and organised by everyone who uses it. [It aims] to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question”. Quora is not a service designed for lawyers – but don’t worry, we’re quite capable of spoiling the party and bending it to our own uses. There are many legal questions being asked on Quora and I’ve saved some of them, which you can see at www.quora.com/Tim-Bratton if you are interested as to how people are using the site.

• spindlelaw.com – Spindle is a service for lawyers and describes itself as “[organising] the law into a tree. Each branch is an area of law that grows narrower branches for topics and rules. You can browse through topics, rules and cross-references”. It’s a US creation, so the focus is US law and contribution appears open to anyone, like a wiki. This is one to keep an eye on.

• Twitter and LinkedIn – we know what these are, and they can work well as a quick crowd-source piece of the ‘does anyone know...?’ variety. Laurie Anstis from Boyes Turner (@ljanstis) sent me a few links (click here and here) illustrating how David Morgan from Burness 
(@davidmorganllb) has used crowd-sourcing to research the approach being taken by employment lawyers when advising clients on the new default retirement age. Interestingly, both Laurie and David are private practitioners, so perhaps it’s wrong of me to have focused this blog post on the benefits to in-house lawyers of crowd-sourcing.

This reference to private practice is a nice if clumsy segue into the major inspiration behind this article, to which I must attribute all rights to Field Fisher Waterhouse (FFW) partner Simon Briskman and senior associate Huw Beverley-Smith.

They visited the FT’s legal team to demonstrate a legal wiki they are developing internally. Their presentation included an introduction to the theory of crowd-sourcing – that is, the illustration of the wisdom of crowds by reference to the crowd at a county fair accurately guessing the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged. The example referred to the weight of a cow rather than an ox, hence their coining of the phrase cow-sourcing – very clever, I thought.

What I particularly liked about FFW’s wiki is the equality of voice that the firm has encouraged. Simon and Huw showed us examples of how the wiki has grown using contributions ranging from newly-qualified solicitors to senior partners, each building on the last contribution. Commentary on, for example, the use of indemnities in practice gives the wiki the potential to be far more than just another intranet resource that might only define what an indemnity is.

The idea of allowing all lawyers to contribute on an equal basis will result in a far better resource than the traditional doling out of annual objectives to create firm precedents. Encouraging fewer senior lawyers to publish in this way will improve their skills by forcing them to practise their own quality assurance before publishing something with their name on it. The wiki looks to be far more than just a precedent bank and includes intelligent commentary on issues and specific client hubs focusing on the issues pertinent to particular clients and how they like their advice delivered.

I had a discussion with Simon and Huw on the pros and cons of FFW making the wiki available to clients. To me, it is a no-brainer. Make it available to clients, ask clients to contribute, and the product will improve. (The FT is not a client, although other companies within the Pearson group are.) To the firm, while it sounded like this has not been ruled out, it is not such a no-brainer. FFW are questioning the potential issues around quality. The downside of the egalitarian approach the firm has taken to internal contribution means that the accuracy and quality of material on the wiki may not always be to the same standard the firm would put on its own letterhead. FFW are considering whether a publicly available sub-perfect product, however innovative, could result in collateral brand damage. This is a fair concern and, wherever FFW end up with their wiki, I applaud them for undertaking some innovative product development.

These concerns highlight the difference between law firms and, say, Google. Google Labs is the area on Google where it makes its not-quite-ready-for-market products available for testing. This is product beta land, where Google actively seeks feedback from the user community, allowing them to finesse their services before formal launch. The whole point of the lab is that the services available within it are not perfect and have scope for improvement. The Google approach is not for everyone, but why couldn’t it work for certain law firm services?

In-housers: put your hand up if you would like to access an innovative law firm service, such as FFW’s wiki, even if it is not perfect. Put your other hand up if you’d be prepared to use that service even without the usual law firm guarantee of quality. Both hands up? Thought so. I do not for one second want to give the message that sub-standard law services are okay – but less than perfect beta services are. If I instruct FFW (or any law firm, for that matter) formally, then I want top drawer advice that I can bet the farm on, nothing else. But if I can use their wiki for free, I’m going to treat that as another resource and not place disproportionate reliance on it. So I encourage law firms to adopt a Google Labs mentality to this kind of thing. Devise, launch, refine, collaborate, improve. As long as it’s clear that it is a law firm labs project, so to speak, the risk of brand damage is minimal and far outweighed by the kudos likely to be generated by such innovation.

Back to my idea of in-house crowd-sourcing. Yes, there are sticky points to overcome, most obviously issues of confidentiality, privilege and ensuring there is no risk of transgressing competition laws. But with the right piece of technology sitting in the middle allowing contributions to be made anonymous, these objections could be overcome.

That does leave the issues of quality assurance and accuracy to navigate, but a combination of peer review and, potentially, a central editor could nail those concerns. And, yes, the technology would need to be pretty funky, intuitive, search-clever and user-friendly. But it’s just another platform. The content would be up to us. And the rules? In order to share, you have to share. That’s it. A kind of creative commons licence, if you will, to use precedents, commentary, war stories, whatever. A grown-up business social media tool for lawyers, but which allows a greater degree of sharing than currently available platforms.

So if any technology providers are reading and want to discuss more, let me know. And even better, if you are a venture capitalist with some spare seed capital sloshing around, then I’m sure we can cut a deal and then sell for at least a multiple of 10 in a couple of years. (I’ve seen Dragons’ Den, I know how it works.) But most importantly, lawyers, what do you think? Is this all naive optimistic theory, or could we make it work? As a profession we never underestimate the wisdom of lawyers. And the theory of the wisdom of crowds is proven. So let’s exploit the wisdom of lawyers in crowds and see what happens. Right, I’m off to cancel my PLC subscription.

Tim Bratton is general counsel of the Financial Times and blogs at thelegalbratblawg. Click here to follow Tim on Twitter.