The clubby atmosphere that once made it possible for law firms to get corporate business based on the strength of the lawyers’ relationships with top executives is on the decline, posing new challenges.

Writing for the American Lawyer, Legal OnRamp founder Paul Lippe gives an example from years past. A partner at White & Case had the good fortune of being married to a woman whose father was CEO of Banker’s Trust, which was at one time the firm’s largest client.

Now Banker’s Trust is part of DeutscheBank. “There are many law firm relationships,” Lippe writes, “and I suspect none are the same sort of intimate, familial relationships that support a presumption of alignment of interests, so the relationship is inherently much more fragile.”

So how can law firms foster ties? Lippe says the counterintuitive answer is technology. “Wikis, blogs, profiles, Twitter and like tools can be used to share existing knowledge or collaborate on new work, both high-volume work like commercial contracts and high-complexity work like major case litigation,” he writes.

“These systems combine the serendipitous communication of the water cooler with the formal structure of the database.”