Is the law firm environment ready for folksonomies and social bookmarking?

Folksonomies (technorati tag; del.icio.us tag) and social bookmarking (technorati tag; del.icio.us tag) certainly are among the concepts that are here to stay and will help us in creating a more meaningful network of how we all see the world. Technorati is currently tracking two million tags that can be searched here, del.ici.us can be searched here
and for flickr (photo search, and yes you can find pictures on "law firm") here

I saw this first on an Austrian blog I regularly read (randgaenge by thomas n. burg) and was quite impressed with the power of tags linked on technorati, delicious and flickr. (although on a personal note I am quite annoyed technorati stopped showing the links to my blog from excitedutterances and mathemagenic for some reason, which still worked two days ago).

Powerful, very powerful I think, but only look into this if you have half an hour to spare right now. I took me by surprise and I should be on the other end of Vienna right now rather than still sitting here being fascinated with stuff that is news to me.

Applying this to a law firm environment, several things come into my mind:

1. How about a KM system using user generated tags? That could potentially have saved a lot of large law firms a lot of money and effort that in some cases led to exactly nothing. (Baker McKenzie however seems to have been successful, as Jason Marty, their Global Director of Knowledge Management describes in this article on Modern Practice.)

2. But on the other hand how would you get busy fee earners - who are by large unwilling to submit their know how themselves - to create their own taxonomies using such a tagging tool?