Blogs and wikis are all the rage, but can they help your firm? Deryck Houghton details his experiences




I am part of the intellectual property and technology (IP&T) team at a regional law firm. Like most firms, we face the problems of differentiating ourselves from rivals, minimising time spent on administration, keeping up with new law, and above all meeting the demands of clients.



We needed to decide how best to portray our team to clients, prospects and the world at large. The Freeth Cartwright IP&T team is itself as large as many IP&T boutiques, but we are not a small niche firm and cannot market ourselves as one. Neither are we a City or global giant with marketing resources to match.



Like many specialist teams, we have used client bulletins or newsletters as part of our marketing effort. These were originally on paper and sent by mail, and more recently in 'soft copy' and emailed. Whatever the format, they were labour intensive. The lawyers had to meet every month and agree on content, write the articles, send them to our design agency, review the resulting document, request amendments, and then sign-off the finished product for distribution. The whole process was long on cost and short on measurable business benefit.



This was not about paper (although we try to operate a paperless department) - the problems were just as real with email. Clients are increasingly using the Internet for information gathering, so how did issuing newsletters match the expectation of clients in the creative and technology sectors? Or support the image of a go-ahead IP&T team? They did not. Clients are also ever more reluctant to pay for advice or information which has not been significantly tailored to their individual circumstances. We needed a new way to deliver this free information at minimum cost and effort.



In the summer of 2006, we decided that a blog would be a simple and cost-effective solution. The blog format offered a neat and easy way to deliver news and comment instantly, and a shop window from which clients could help themselves to information.



The blog, IMPACT, combines formal news items on IP and IT law and pieces included for no better reason than we found them interesting, amusing or deserving of comment, or simply a 'rant'.



Unfettered by any formal newsletter format, items could be any length and even simply frivolous, allowing the team's personality to come through. The ability to publish instantly allows us to cover legal developments as they break. This helps us 'pitch' our team in a way which marks us out in a crowded marketplace.



The blog also carries a library of generic guides on various legal topics and 'frequently asked questions', which sit alongside the daily postings. These cover areas on which we are often asked to advise, but which we have found it difficult to charge for. Clients requesting this sort of information can be directed to the blog, and feedback suggests that many are now using it as their first port of call for basic legal information, before approaching us for in-depth advice. Much less fee-earner time is now spent handling low-level queries, allowing us to devote more of our time to more profitable activity.



Setting up the blog (we used Typepad - www.typepad.com) was easy, and took less time than it took us to produce a single client bulletin. We did not need to involve the firm's IT department. Our annual Typepad subscription costs less than we paid our external agency to lay out a single paper newsletter.



Typepad also provides reader statistics, so we now know that people are reading what we write. The blog format allows readers to comment on postings, and over time these comments have helped us make our content more relevant and useful for readers.



We are also excited by the opportunities presented by wikis - websites that allow users to create and edit the site's content. The best-known example is the popular online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, but wikis can also be private, even completely in-house. We are looking at using a wiki as the platform on which to run a project for the revision of a client's standard contract library.



Experience shows that a major problem on such projects is getting key people - ours and the client's - together in one place at the same time. Contract revisions which could be achieved very quickly can wait weeks for sign-off meetings. Using a wiki, individuals can contribute input whenever they are free to do so and to collaborate online from remote locations, with significant savings in time and cost. These collaborative technologies allow a single document to be held and made accessible online, editable concurrently by multiple users while providing an audit trail allowing everyone to follow the changes being made.



We are also moving our team's know-how library into a wiki, where it will be easier to update. We are trying to cut internal email volumes by using an instant messaging service called Skype, which allows us to take some internal team communication out of the email system, and to conduct multi-party discussions on-screen in real time, even with clients.



Technology is not an end in itself, but provided you have a clear idea of what you want it to do for you and why, these emerging technologies can offer practical and cost-effective solutions to real business problems.



Deryck Houghton is head of IP&T at regional firm Freeth Cartwright. Go to impact.freethcartwright.com.