Innovative Use by Law Department of Company-wide "Wiki"

A "Wiki" is not a Hawaiian phrase from the movie The Descendants.  Rather, "it is is a website whose users can add, modify, or delete its content via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a rich-text editor."  I got this definition from the most famous wiki of all, Wikipedia.  How is that relevant to lawyers and mobile professionals?  When you think about this definition, a Wiki is basically a way for geographically dispersed individuals to work together in a group. 

 

My colleague John Rentz is General Counsel for Boxer Property here in Houston.  Boxer Property is a very large and successful developer and manager of commercial real estate properties.  Their buildings (and brand) are best known for their yellow signage, which always lists their phone number as:  877-777-RENT.  I find it an amusing coincidence that the last name of their GC is "Rentz". 

At a recent General Counsel Forum event, John discussed how Boxer uses a "Wiki" on its intranet, as follows:

Boxer has 46 leasing agents in 15 different markets in 11 states.  To try and streamline the leasing process, all the states share the same basic form of commercial lease agreement (in an office form and retail form), with slight modifications from state to state to adapt to local rules on things like default remedies.  The problem was that the agents out in the field and in different states were isolated from each other in the sense that it was difficult to see and share what type of common changes were requested by tenants and approved by senior leasing managers and/or the legal department.   To remedy that, and reduce the amount of requests coming up the chain, and thereby speed up the process and put more authority in the agent’s hands, I put together a “wiki” page on the internal Boxer website of approved lease language samples.  It shows a number of common changes that any agent can make, up to more complex or specialty changes for particular types of tenants and situations, that they can use with simple approval from a senior manager, but they have the language in hand ready to mark up.   It is a “wiki” in the sense that employees can post suggested changes to it, subject to an internal approval process.

I was feeling pretty good about the fact that we had developed an online library on our company's intranet of all our key documents.  But Boxer has taken it to the next logical step, using a Wiki as a forum for its employees to conduct work as a group.  Does your company or law firm have a Wiki?