Evidently there are high hopes for social networking in the future. I have recently come across two blogs discussing whether social networking may replace (respectively) lawyers and 'some government functions'.
1. This topic has also been raised by the Gartner group, releasing a press release stating, Gartner Says Citizen Social Networks Will Complement, and May Replace, Some Government Functions.
From eGov
2. Legal futurist Richard Susskind's sequel to his 1996 best-seller The Future of Law: Facing the Challenges of Information Technology (Oxford UP) will be published in December. The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services (Oxford UP, December 2008) continues the author's focus on the effect of advances in information technology upon the law and legal practice, providing fresh perspectives and analysis of anticipated developments in the decade to come. In particular, he aims to explore the extent to which the role of the traditional lawyer can be sustained, in the face of the challenging trends in the legal marketplace and the new techniques and technologies for the delivery of legal services.
Among Suskind's predictions: (1) legal advice will be recycled by clients in social networking communities just like knowledge management recycles attorney work product internally and (2) client communities will push law firms to come together and form their own social networks to hold down costs by not reinventing the wheel.
From Law Librarian Blog
No comments:
Post a Comment