I am writing a paper with the same title and have had a chance to review some of the older literature and some literature that is (finally) law firm specific.
There are exciting things happening in this space and the completed paper will be posted here in a few months, but for now I just wanted to highlight a product that has continued to intrigue me. The name of the product is Confluence from Atlassian Software (www.atlassian.com/confluence). Confluence is a knowledge management "platform" that integrates wikis, blogs, email archives, discussion forums and more. The entry level price for 25 users is $1,200.00 USD, a phenomenal value.
Now at this price point you might think that their target market is small to medium size enterprises and I am quite certain that a fair number of small businesses use it. BUT, take a look at their customer list and you will find some of the largest names in Tech (e.g. Adobe, EMC, Cisco and surprisingly Microsoft), some of the fortune 500 (e.g. Shell, KFC, BMW and Sony) and two of the large consultancies (Accenture & PricewaterhouseCoopers). Yeah their enterprise licenses are a bit more expensive but not much more ($4,000 USD for 500 users and $8,000 USD for unlimited users).
BTW, if you are a solo practitioner, you can get a two person "personal" license FREE (as in nada). These "boys" are doing something right! More to come...
Thanks for mentioning Confluence! There are many wikis one can choose to use, most of which are free open source apps. But besides the competitive aspect in the wiki market, Atlassian has taken the position that most enterprise software is overpriced (thus JIRA and our new Crowd software are also priced quite reasonably). We often emphasize the big name companies who use our products (the recognizable names that you cite, for example), but as you point out, a big portion of our customers are small and mid-sized. We've also given (and continue to give) our products to hundreds of non-profits for free, too. :)
Posted by: Jon Silvers | January 01, 2007 at 03:22 PM