There’s always people that have privacy concerns when new technologies come out but as soon as they see how helpful and beneficial they can be, they’ll soon be one of the many adopters of that technology.

Excellent writeup – I particularly enjoyed the comparison to the initial acceptance period of e-mail. Disruptive technologies ought to sell themselves, but we still have to work hard to get people to try them with us.

Good points. During much of our research work for the Redefining Employee Computing project,(nGenera Insight’s REC Re.sults Project) legal was very involved in the discussion. In a couple instances legal was actually included in the pilot groups that enterprises used to test out some of these new technologies. The rationale being that if legal buys into the value than much of the battle is won. We also found that most of the legal teams were very open to learning more about the tools in order to help the organization make an informed decision on behalf of the entire enterprise. I agree very much with Daniel in that there is much work to be done in getting people to try out the tools and work with IT to fully understand the value.

Another dimension to Law 2.0 is the automation of legal information via collaboratively-built knowledge bases. For example, the site I’ve been developing, Jureeka.net, allows lawyers and law students to create interviews on a legal topic by representing their knowledge of the law as if-then rules. These interviews make the law much more digestible to the public and therefore more accessible. Publishers of knowledge bases share in the site’s ad revenue. In short, it’s a new mechanism for delivering legal guidance.

Lawyers tend to be inherently conservative and law school trains them to be so. Lawyers are trained to ask what can go wrong, not what can go right. This means they (we) will always be suspicious of the new. Personally, I like this because this allows those few of us who embrace the new technologies to jump out in front.

[...] Is Law 2.0 possible?Wikinomics contributor Ming Kwan discusses perceived legal hurdles to the workplace adoption of knowledge sharing systems. She points out that e-mail was once strongly resisted as a liability and a distraction but that its undeniable benefits eventually secured its acceptance. Hopefully the upside of knowledge sharing will drive a similar workplace sea change towards accepting wikis and forums and other forms of public collaboration amongst teammates. Kwan’s article also links to some useful resources for crafting workable office publishing policies and getting legal advice on your knowledge sharing concerns. © 2008 Daniel J. Pritchett & sharingatwork.com Share and Enjoy: [...]

I think law 2.0 is inevitable to some degree. Law ultimately reflects social values and practices, albeit with a significant lag (one of the posts mentions the conservative nature of law and the legal profession). As I wrote recently, one possible extension of law 2.0 involves using the Web to gather data for surveys. Surveys are often used to inform legal decision making during trials.