Legal Research

LCO and Technology: Desperately Seeking Help

By Patricia Hughes

So far we at the LCO are being pretty basic about the technology we’re using. A standard (I guess now “traditional”) website that is okay as far as it goes, making RSS available, posting everything we write. But we need to do more. I’m planning to issue our family law project options “paper” in other than traditional form (shamed into it by Simon C. at a lunch with KM folks), maybe as a wiki.

I listened to a webcast (pretty basic in format, too, actually) of how to connect with the new media to get the organization’s message out there, especially to a younger demographic, and that made me realize how stodgy we are (okay,I knew, but now I can’t be in denial about it). For the last six months, I’ve been planning to retain a consultant or consultants to help us with this. We’ll still find a consultant, but I finally clued in that I have a great resource in SLAW. SLAW began as a law and technology blog and much of its content still relates to that - and I also realized that at least some SLAW bloggers are my demographic or near enough. So this week, I’m looking for help…

First, I’d be pleased to hear about any consultants you think would do a good job for us. We have some recommended web designers, but I’m not sure where “media” and “web design” are synonymous and we need both. You can send me any suggestions by email. (I also want to find a KM expert.)

More to the point, I’d appreciate any ideas you have about how to improve our website and use social networking sites. I’d like it to be interactive (but retain some control over it). I’m thinking of writing a blog (I may have mentioned that Simon invited me to write this blog as a way of practising for my LCO blog). I can tell you that none of the people currently working in our office uses any social networking sites. At the end of last summer, I asked one of our students about her Facebook page, but we still haven’t done anything about that.

It’s not terribly difficult to reach professionals (although the better we are at it, the more successful we can be) or community organizations (as long as we know about them). We want to reach as many of the public as possible, in different cohorts. We want to get our work out there, at all stages of development. We want to hear from people, but we don’t want to be overwhelmed - we just don’t have the resources to handle too many questions or comments, or to address less than constructive comments (either by engagement or by deletion). Maybe that’s enough right now. I’d really like the LCO to be a forerunner in using technology to advantage - and right now the field is clear! Let me know if you have any ideas. At least, I should be further ahead than I am in selecting consultants.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on December 09, 2008 (boomark / email).