Background and early initiatives
Allen & Overy LLP is an international legal practice with 29 offices in major cities worldwide. It has almost 5,000 staff and 500 partners who advise governments, banks, major corporations and institutions throughout the world.
Like all large law firms Allen & Overy is a knowledge-centric organisation where the greatest knowledge asset is its people. The idea of using new technology for knowledge development and sharing is therefore attractive. Two features of Allen & Overy suggest that it would become an early adopter of social networking. Firstly, it has a very collegiate culture and knowledge sharing is part of that culture. Secondly, Allen & Overy has always prided itself on an innovative mind-set and a willingness to be ahead of the curve in adopting new approaches and processes.
Set against that, lawyers can be risk averse and formal in their attitude. The introduction of social business networking tools and practices needed to be well-planned and implemented to secure understanding and support across the practice.
For some time Allen & Overy has maintained a successful knowledge management function. Its focus – as in other law firms – was initially mainly on formal know-how documents and databases. But it was felt more needed to be done to support informal knowledge management, particularly in new or developing areas of law and practice. So, in 2005, a decision was made to undertake a pilot initiative on Web 2.0, to be managed jointly by knowledge management and IT. It was recognised at the outset that, although what would be used could be described as ‘social software’, any application would need to have evident business relevance. Accordingly three networking communities were set up: one based on a single business team of lawyers; the second to exchange technical know-how on an aspect of new European legislation; the third as a multi-editor office newsletter. The positive experiences with these three initiatives led to a commitment to the development of wider social business networking across the practice. The resulting system combines the following components: group blogs, e-mail alerter, wikis, shared bookmarks and news feeds.
Applications for graduate recruitment
Allen & Overy use single person blogs as part of their external recruitment site for their graduate entry. There are at any time around five regular bloggers who range in seniority from a partner to a graduate entrant. It's interesting to note that this is the only instance at Allen & Overy of an open, public blog and also the only instance of an individual rather than a group blog. Most of its work to date has been with closed sites, focused on trusted internal and client communities, which have a very different risk profile to blogs and sites like Facebook open to all on the internet.
Allen & Overy has not, unlike some competitor businesses, sought to develop Facebook applications for candidates at the recruitment stage. Some ad hoc activities have taken place – for example a site where a group of summer vacation students share experiences – but this was instigated by participants and welcomed, but not initiated, by the practice.
Social networking sites
As social business networking has developed, questions have arisen on the appropriate vocabulary or terminology. Ruth Ward, the Head of Knowledge Systems & Development at the practice, has been anxious that unfamiliar jargon does not become a barrier: the important thing is to emphasise what the different Web 2.0 tools actually do and the benefits they bring to the workplace. For example, when starting out in 2005, Allen & Overy used the term Group Space to describe their wiki tool as Ruth felt the term wiki would not be sufficiently meaningful to people. Now people are much more familiar with Wikipedia, etc and so they are simply called wikis. But such demarcations are not important to most users of the Allen & Overy system – they just know they are a member of a particular community site which includes a range of features to support communication and sharing for that community.
Two particularly interesting communities are described below.
The HR Exchange
Allen and Overy has 80 human resources staff in London and another 80 elsewhere in the world. By establishing a site for the function, they have sought to move away from update and enquiry through individual or group e-mail – instead they are encouraging participants to share information and experience across the function using social networking technology. The HR Exchange was launched in December 2007. As well as a repository of information on HR procedures and standard letter templates, there are active discussion spaces, in which HR colleagues both in and outside London participate. These cover current HR projects as well as advice and knowledge-sharing on HR practices.
Parents@A&O
This initiative uses online social networking technology to bring together on a virtual basis a large and diverse global group of A&O staff who share a common thread: they are parents or about to become parents. The site has more than 250 people registered as members – it is estimated that this is approximately one third of the total number of parents in the London office and membership is growing rapidly. As is the case in all internal networking sites at Allen & Overy, members receive a daily e-mail alert notifying them of new content.
Parents@A&O is a source of all sorts of useful information for parents with children of all ages. Some is generated by Allen & Overy itself – for example information about the maternity coaching programme or dates for lunchtime parenting seminars. A considerable amount of information comes from the parents themselves: for instance, links to favourite websites for buying children’s clothing or suggestions on what to do in school holidays. The site has regular news-feeds so that busy parents can pick up items that they would otherwise miss. It also contains an interactive discussion forum where items of concern can be shared. Most recently a monthly ‘Ask the Expert’ series has featured external experts who answer individual questions on a range of topics that parents submit through the site. There was, for example, considerable interest in safeguarding children from cyber-bullying.
Jane Masey, HR Policy & Diversity Manager within Allen & Overy’s HR function has responsibility for maintaining the site but she emphasises that the content is determined by the members and not the HR function. The subjects discussed are many and varied and recent examples have included swimming, cyber safety and the use of slug pellets. Jane believes that the establishment of this site is a practical manifestation of Allen & Overy's commitment to family friendly policies and practices. It is also a modern expression of the HR’s role as an employee champion –this is achieved through an intervention based on facilitation not through representation.
The challenge of social networking
After their experiences to date, Allen & Overy are convinced that networking using technology will increase, both internally and externally. Indeed, according to Ruth Ward, social business networking at Allen & Overy has reached tipping point. Over half of the staff use a site regularly and this figure has been achieved without the need for any formal internal promotion or advertising. And Ruth's team currently receives a request for the creation of a new site almost every week.
The initial Allen & Overy social business networking template, developed in 2005, is still the dominant model with a wiki repository, discussion blog, shared bookmarks and news feeds and this will carry over into their new, more permanent system currently being developed based on Microsoft SharePoint 2007. Ruth Ward feels that Web 2.0 technology is becoming easier for people to implement as it becomes available as part of Microsoft and other broader offerings rather than requiring separate software purchase or development. But the challenge remains to guide the development of Web 2.0 applications that capture the imagination of the intended participants and serve the needs of the business.
It is fair to say that member-managed discussion sites for communities rather than single-person blogs are still seen as the most promising development area in the short-term. As Ruth Ward puts it: “The stakes are higher with individual management and employee blogging. To be successful, I think management blogs need to represent a real change from what has gone before in terms of management updates, they need to be authentic and they need to be regular. It’s also vital to address if readers will be able to make comments and if, when and how any comments will be moderated”. More generally she feels that, although the technology and design may have common features, it is wrong to seek a single approach on the development of social networking in organisations. In her view it must depend on the underlying purpose of each initiative in its context.