On Monday, I explained the benefits of information delivery to lawyers using “enterprise RSS.” On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported on a good, concrete example of why law firms need to consider enterprise RSS.
SEC Financial-Reports Database To Undergo $54 Million Upgrade (WSJ, 9/26/06) reports that the SEC will overhaul EDGAR (the database of public corporate filings) with “interactive data ‘tagging’ that makes it easier for investors, analysts and the agency to find, search for and compare information.” Moreover, the database overhaul “will allow users to receive real-time streaming data using RSS feeds and other automated Web tools to receive the latest corporate data from newly-filed corporate reports.”
For transactional lawyers or for heads of law firm client service teams, automatically receiving notification of client, competitor, or prospect filings could be very valuable (and free!). While enterprise RSS is not the only means to get at this information, it probably will turn out to be the most effective way for BigLaw to manage and deliver this and huge volumes of other information that will, over time, become RSS-enabled.