RSS feeds: keeping lawyers and their clients informed

Nabarro started using external RSS feeds in 2008 to deal with an excess of electronic information and emails. Nabarro appreciated that its staff "subscribed to so many updates and emails and were overloaded", explains Mark Collins, head of knowledge at Nabarro. In mid-2009, Nabarro also started offering internal RSS feeds to its clients. The intention behind this initiative was to attract clients to Nabarro's website.

Bird & Bird introduced external RSS feeds in 2009, after trialling a free version with Netvibes, a publishing platform, in 2008. According to Kathryn Pearson, knowledge and learning manager at Bird & Bird, their intention was to enable their fee earners to access a wide range of legal and industry updates without having to sign up to countless email alerts, or having to visit numerous external websites.

Nabarro uses external RSS feeds for legal updates (case law and articles) and for legal and business information (news and data). It uses the provider FeedBurner to filter the legal updates and legal and business information by practice area or industry sector. The tailored results are then streamed to Nabarro’s intranet pages (it has intranet pages for each practice area or industry sector group). Nabarro also sends emails to its fee earners with links to external RSS feeds. Collins states that a fee earner in the corporate department, for example, can then access legal know-how and business intelligence updates all in one place: "It is a bit like spreading a selection of quality newspapers, industry magazines and legal journals across a large desk, and then being able to browse their contents at high-level, or in-depth, without moving from your desk."

In addition, Nabarro offers two kinds of internal RSS feeds to its clients. Clients can sign up to receive Nabarro's latest news via RSS (www.nabarro.com/lt_rss.aspx), and also to receive Nabarro’s legal briefings via RSS (http://feeds2.feedburner.com/NabarroRssBriefingsAndReportsFeed).

Bird & Bird receives a wide range of content, including general business news, legal know-how and developments in its practice and sector groups, and also news from the legal press via a secure in-house aggregator, hosted on Sharepoint. All Bird & Bird lawyers have access to its RSS site via its intranet. In addition to the English language feeds, a number of Bird & Bird’s offices have their own RSS sites, offering RSS feeds in English as well as that office’s native language (for example, French, German, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch and Finnish, to date). Pearson notes that they have also added an email option, "so that users can easily send each other items of interest at the click of a button".

Nabarro finds that for external RSS feeds, both the legal and business content is useful. However, Collins adds that the best content is from suppliers on which it can rely for quality and relevance. For its internal RSS feeds, Nabarro believes that its legal briefings offer clients the most useful information.

Pearson states that the use of content varies across Bird & Bird. "Naturally, the marketing and business development teams are hugely interested in the industry sector news, whereas fee earners can follow both industry news and also legal developments", she explains.

Both firms feel that there are significant benefits in using RSS feeds. Collins states that from Nabarro's perspective, an advantage is "relevant tailored content (automatically updated) pushed in ready-made email or web page format".

Bird & Bird comments that using external RSS feeds enables it to group together updates from a wide range of sources, often for free. These updates are particularly useful for those people who do not wish to receive email updates, "although many people are still happy to do so", explains Pearson.

However, RSS feeds also have their limitations. A disadvantage that Collins sees with using external RSS feeds is that Nabarro is dependent on its feed reader and its basic formatting; it needs its IT department to develop it further. Also, adds Collins, "some people still prefer the paper version".

In terms of Nabarro's internal RSS feeds, Collins points out that a disadvantage is not being able to deliver all variants of its content to serve every client's needs.

Pearson notes that, from Bird & Bird’s perspective, there are still many websites/content providers that do not offer RSS feeds, and therefore there is, in fact, a limit to how much of a "one-stop shop" Bird & Bird can provide.

Anna Finlayson, PLC.