Collaboration and Technology – Initial Efforts

Collaboration is working together towards the same objective.  It can be adversarial and still collaboration.  It is often adversarial in mediation. Clients can keep secrets and even ask us to hold information they provide to us as confidential, although I think this concept is going to get worn down when they give us fraudulent information as a means of attempting us to move their negotiation strategy forward. They can provide us selective information which is either meant to focus us on their strategy or is out and out advocacy.

Believe it or not I’m looking to technology to help expand my ability to improve outcomes in collaboration.  From what I read there are already numerous packages out there used by law firms and even shared with their opponents.  One example is software used to collaborate on and share documents.  I’m working with one of my BNI Living Green members to consider WordPress for use with document collaboration and I have one project I am pursuing, trying to entice two other software manufacturers who I consider have tools very helpful to my collaboration interests: decision making and workflow management in capital project conflict avoidance, prevention, and resolution.

Undertaking these efforts may not bring immediate financial benefit.  Does anything in mediation do so? However, for collaboration to work it needs to be efficient, to the degree possible, analytical, have integrity, and act as an agent of transparency.  As our client base expands beyond our own state and perhaps even becomes global the use of software towards achieving this goal becomes more pertinent.  Of course security is always a concern and must be included in  any consideration.