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Socialtext in Law

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Socialtext offers wikis for use behind your firewall (or hosted on their server) in order to facilitate collaboration among employees. In their words:

As the first wiki company, Socialtext is the leader in making web collaboration secure, scalable and easy to use. A Socialtext wiki is a secure, group-editable website.

Nothing wildly new here, though I have to say they’ve got some powerful folks on their board in Tim Draper, Joi Ito and Jimmy Wales, which suggests to me that they’ve got a good chance of being around for a while.

I got a sales-ish email from one of their folks the other day to tell me how Socialtext is being used in a legal or lawfirm context in connection with their own financing. Paul Youlten of their European office says:

We are using our own (open source) wiki technology to track the progress of the Legal Due Diligence in our latest round of financing. (screenshots attached). The wiki runs as an extranet connecting our law firm (DLA Piper), Socialtext management, our VCs and our VC’s own law firm. It seems to be working really well – and was very simple to set up.

For the curious, I’ve uploaded the screenshots he sent and you can view them here: one, two, three.

I think wikis in law firms make sense and might be almost essential in any complex legal action. I know Connie’s been experimenting with them and Steven probably has as well. Is anyone using them for straight-up legal work?

Comments

  1. Steven Matthews
    February 20th, 2007 at 5:11 pm

    Simon, for me wikis are a simple open editing tool. We do use wiki technology in-house, but each time with a designated purpose, and not the free-form tool that I think a lot of people imagine.

    For “straight-up legal work”, I think it depends again on the application. I have seen wiki technology integrated with virtual deal rooms. We are not currently doing any, but perhaps Simon C. can add something. … For other matters, I think firms are mostly working with out-of-the-box extranet packages. If wiki technology is going to be incorporated, it will likely come from the Extranet vendors adding this functionality.