This Week's ABA Journal Legal Rebel Is a Paralegal & Wiki Creator

It always feels good to see paralegals and other legal support staffers featured on national legal websites, including this week's ABA Journal Legal Rebel, corporate paralegal manager Paula Nascimento. She's making headlines as an innovative creator of an online wiki site she designed for her firm:

...Stocked with training manuals, firm policies, question and answer forums, templates, instructional videos and even a community blog, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton’s New York City corporate paralegal team now had Nascimento’s—and each other’s—knowledge, resources and expertise at their fingertips.

The excellent feature article includes a YouTube video of Nascimento explaining how The Corporate Paralegal Wiki and companion blog, the ParaSite, benefits her co-workers, who can access key company resources and specialized information at any time, as well as contribute to the body of knowledge contained at the collaborative sites.

The Best Known Wiki in the World

For any readers quietly wondering, "What's a wiki?", it's simply a website that allows a community of users to add and edit content. Wikipedia.org is likely the most well known example of a wiki. Some recommended free wiki software platforms include Wikidot, Wetpaint, and PBworks (only personal is free).

For the past several months, I've been talking to (er, maybe, arguing with) my supervising attorney about creating a firm wiki for our policies, procedures, and the technology tips it's part of my job duties to present (or bribe a co-worker into sharing). He's leaning toward keeping and sharing this information via the news-sharing feature on our case management software, but I'm concerned we'll lose the information if we ever change software, whereas it would not be a concern if it was stored in a firmwide wiki.

Anyone out there using a law firm wiki? Any recommendations for wiki platforms?

Source:  ABA Journal Legal Rebels