One of the criticisms leveled at lawyers is that if our clients did what we recommended, employees would still be writing memos on notebook paper and sending them down to the steno pool for transcription.  In some ways that criticism is warranted when a client wants to incorporate technology that doesn’t facilitate compliance with the law.  While a particular item of technology, like a blog, might move your business forward, the real world, like liability for a defamatory post, often intervenes.  Awareness’ products seem embrace technology, and the productivity promised by it, while allowing compliance related efforts to take place in the background.

Awareness’ products incorporate permissioning, versioning and filtering out of the box.  These tools are crucial for businesses who seek to utilize office 2.0 tools, but who also understand the theory of litigation prevention (as opposed to litigation attraction).   Permissioning  is a great way for larger companies to embrace these technologies without sacrificing controls put in place to deal with real world issues.  For example, while free and open communication is a great thing, I think even the most diehard technology evangelist would agree that human resources’ wiki shouldn’t be open.  So business faces a choice:  deny HR a wiki, create a totally separate system for HR, or abandon wikis altogether.  A set of permission based wikis may solve this problem.

Versioning is another great tool.  Companies often need to know when and where a document, blog or wiki was updated.  This might help in understanding why a particular contract provision was worded the way it was or where a trouble ticket got mishandled.  The latter is a nice way to pre-empt litigation.  Imagine if you were using a wiki to problem solve a server crash that caused other problems.  By referring to prior versions of your wiki, you could effectively communicate with your customer about how things went wrong, and why.  This type of communication is often the single best way of keeping that customer from calling their lawyer, and increasing your legal costs as a result.

I also really like this version of filtering.  Filtering has VERY negative connotations.  When people, including myself, think of filtering, we tend to think of very heavy handed, and honestly, very lawyer driven, filtering systems that end up forcing people to communicate using vague and tortured language.  However properly implemented, filtering can be an effective business communication tool.  For example, you might want to create an internal corporate blog.  To make the blog effective you put few or no restrictions on what can be discussed.  You could use filtering to leverage your internal blog.  By setting up rules, certain content from your internal blog could be posted to your public blog.  Not only does this save you time and money, it makes your external blog more authentic, and might result in more market acceptance.

So, overall, my conversation with Mr. Carter was pretty exciting.  It’s interesting to see technology embraced and adapted in ways that acknowledge real world issues and the way corporate environments need to be structured to deal with business today.