Strategic Legal Technology 
Two mainstream media articles last week illustrate the power of collective intelligence. Both make me wonder whether large law firms take full advantage of their scale.
Herds on the Street (Jonah Lehrer, Wall Street Journal, 19 March 2011) describes how traders at one hedge fund exchanged information with instant messages (IM). With the “the average trader engaging in 16 IM conversations at a time… this ceaseless messaging wasn’t a distraction. Instead, it allowed traders to pool their information” to make more winning trades.
Users Help a Weather Site Hone Its Forecasts (Daniel E. Slotnik, The New York Times, 20 March 2011) reports that a weather channel taps 20,000 amateur-operated weather stations around the world to ‘crowd source’ real-time weather data. With data readings from more locations, forecasts can improve.
Both examples illustrate collective intelligence, one within an organization and the other in the world at large. With social media, such “crowd sourcing” examples abound.
How many large law firms meaningfully access their collective intelligence? Knowledge management (KM) tries to do so with processes, incentives, and systems to capture, share, and re-use know-how. Even successful KM program rarely tap the full potential and many firms lack active KM programs. BigLaw marketing touts its global reach and full service but I cannot recall seeing claims that high lawyer headcounts yield better advice or results. A missed opportunity?
If we could quantify the amount of sharing by firm, I wonder if it would correlate with client win rates - or with firm realization rates. And might we see a big differences that turn on partner compensation? I wonder whether the legal market lags other professions in tapping the collective intelligence of a large organization.
One problem for most law firms is that the crowd isn’t actually very big. For example, once you get out of the top 10, no UK firm has more than a thousand lawyers. If the firm requires synchronous engagement with crowd-sourcing, it is likely that a much smaller number will be available to provide their views. At that stage, my guess is that errors are much more likely to creep in than in the examples you link to.
On the other hand, there is something to be said for crowdsourcing of a different kind. It intrigues me that clients tend to keep their firms apart, when pooling their expertise might generate more useful content and insight.
Comment by Mark Gould 3/28/2011 @ 4:39 am
As someone just getting into the KM area at a law firm (and KM in general) I have often wondered on the impact of crowd sourcing that is already underway. Whether the crowd is through email, IM or face to face, I am sure that it is going on. Perhaps the crowd should extend more broadly than it does, but there is some benefit to these discussions.
Comment by Sean Brady 3/30/2011 @ 7:20 am