In thinking further about our conversation regarding the lower adoption rates in law firms, it’s clear that the issue-spotting tendency that David Hobbie mentioned does hamper lawyer adoption rates. In addition, law firms (like many businesses) aren’t good at creating what Dave Snowden calls “safe-fail” opportunities to innovate. Until that happens, E2.0′s risks will be more apparent than its opportunities as far as managers are concerned.

- Mary

It is interesting that the lawyers you met on this occasion did not bring up some of the legal concerns that to date have been focused on email. My general experience even with the limited E20 tools I’ve worked with is that they are much more transparent and less “siloed” than traditional technology, so the concerns around the expense of email search and retrieval by custodian are justifiably less present. Isn’t it easier to go to an intranet search engine and then download a person’s profile and activities tagged with their name than to review the 50,000 email in their inbox?

One reason why lawyers in particular are not on the forefront of adopting new technology–even where (like wikis and blogs) they fit with existing frameworks–is that we are trained to think “what’s the worst that could happen” or “what are all the things that could possibly go wrong.” We bring that same thinking to our daily work.

David