Web 2.0 Architectures

Web 2.0 Offshoots

Increasingly, we have been encountering new movements directly triggered by Web 2.0 ideas. They range across the spectrum of human endeavor. For example, a few years ago Law Practice Today, a journal of the American Bar Association, ran a detailed story on Web 2.0 and its tie-in with the law.^[116] Why do lawyers care about Web 2.0, you ask? As it turns out, Web 2.0 has spawned a relatively full-blown movement: Law 2.0.

Law 2.0 is a conceptual departure from the law business of yesteryear. Like other aspects of Web 2.0, some claim it’s in beta right now. There is already a Law 2.0 application called Wex,^[117] (a legal wiki encyclopedia available to everyone). Document management, a common challenge for lawyers, is evolving rapidly into document engineering. Integrating existing technologies such as PDF into document-centric processes has been a key focus of evangelists such as Lori Defurio (Adobe) and Bob Glushko (Berkeley University), who cowrote what we consider the definitive book on the subject.^[118]

Law 2.0 is built on the premise that current law practices are insufficient, as they describe problems to be solved and the solutions to those problems. In theory, law should reflect its real-world, multidisciplinary existence and should rely on more than the treatise-reporter-practice law triangle,^[119] an established pattern within the law community. Law 2.0 is really about building law practices that recognize the capabilities that technology offers society today. ...