A Growing Interest in Intranets
FindLawBy Steven A. Meyerowitz
When lawyers and other employees at Stevens & Lee arrive at work every morning at their Reading office - or at any of the other 10 offices the firm has in eastern and central Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware - they can turn on their computers and then, as so many other people across Pennsylvania and the country do during the course of a day, click on the Internet browser icon.
Only here, the result is somewhat different. The typical home page at Stevens & Lee's computers is not nytimes.com or the Web sites of The Wall Street Journal or CNN. Rather, it's the firm's "intranet" page.
According to Rose Lowther, a lawyer and director of information sharing at Stevens & Lee, when the firm's lawyers or staff enter the firm's intranet, they are able to locate everything from news about clients, frequently used Web sites, and forms regularly relied on by various practice areas, to descriptions of upcoming events, firm-wide telephone contact lists and, for partners only, the firm's up-to-date confidential financial information.
Lawyers and staff at Pittsburgh's Babst, Calland, Clements & Zomnir P.C. also are able to click onto an intranet at their firm. At Babst, Calland, computer users may find some of the same information and research links that are available on the Stevens & Lee intranet, but they will also discover a great deal that is different. As described by Melissa Jones, Babst, Calland's marketing director, they will have at their fingertips a list of their firm's committees, a phone directory, calendar of events and networking opportunities as well as classified ads posted by their firm's employees.
Managing Information
The explosive growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web has allowed attorneys to access an enormous amount of data and facts. An intranet is a way of efficiently and effectively managing that information. An intranet, in other words, is different from the Internet in that an intranet is tailored to provide the information most beneficial and most appropriate to a firm's individual lawyers and staff members. As stated by Gary N. Osborne, director of information technology in the Cleveland office of the law firm of Calfee, Halter & Griswold L.L.P., an intranet "is an internal repository of a variety of information contained within a firm, including client-related information and news links." It is, he says, "the place where our users can go to find information."
The breadth of knowledge that can be placed on an intranet is staggering. It may encompass the whole of the intellectual property generated by the law firm as well as selected information from the Internet. For example, the Calfee, Halter intranet, known within the firm as "CalfeeNet," has three separate sections. There is a general information section, containing access to airline and travel information. An administrative section allows lawyers and other employees to reach the accounting, records, and human resources departments. In the third section, all the firm's major practice areas have individual pages with their own important news. Osborne explained that the corporate practice page has a practice area calendar (noting, for example, the date, location, and speakers at upcoming departmental luncheons), a collection of links to a forms index, relevant Internet links to the New York Stock Exchange and the Securities and Exchange Commission, and a customized Lexis research link.
The CalfeeNet may be used to see the weather, read the newspaper, launch e-mail, learn if the next day is "business casual," schedule conference rooms, order coffee for a meeting, and have a data projector delivered. A secretary can look up a client billing number, find the open matters, and use it to submit a lawyer's billing information to the billing department. Anyone at the firm can electronically complete, submit, and print out a medical-claims form or a dependent-care form.
Designing an Intranet
Different law firms have different intranets because a law firm's intranet reflects the firm's practice and people. Indeed, an intranet should be designed with the firm's particular needs - and capabilities - clearly in mind.
Travis Yates, director of Web development services at the Legal Technology Institute of the University of Florida's Levin College of Law, stated that a small firm can have an effective intranet site, although it might be more "static" than "database driven." Moreover, he added, a firm that has a small information technology department "should not have a system that would need 10 people to maintain."
When designing an intranet, firms should involve more than just their IT professionals. Rose Lowther of Stevens & Lee said it took her firm nine months to come up with the concept behind its intranet, with five people from the firm on the team that created it.
A key player on any firm's intranet team should be the firm's librarian. According to Jeff P. Cohan, the library director of Newark's Carpenter, Bennett & Morrissey, there are three primary reasons to involve librarians in the creation and maintenance of a firm's intranet.
First, he pointed out that law librarians are primarily charged with the responsibility of organizing information in law firms. "They are trained in library science and have a special knowledge of the field of law, including external sources such as Westlaw, Lexis and legal newspapers, and internal sources such as databases on clients and attorney work product."
Cohan also said librarians are able to "organize this information efficiently." They are trained to examine the costs associated with different resources and to suggest from a cost perspective whether there should be "one link or two different links" to the same general resource on the firm's intranet.
Perhaps most important, Cohan emphasized that librarians can evaluate the "reliability" of information. "Some information on the Internet is not as good as other information," Cohan observed. "An advantage of a firm's intranet is that the librarian is able to determine if the information to which it is linked is reliable."
Increasing Usage
Even if a firm has devoted all appropriate resources to the creation of its intranet, it is unlikely that 100 percent of all lawyers and staff will use it. Still, to maximize its benefits and reduce other costs, it is important to try to have as many people in a firm as possible use its intranet.
Gary Osborne of Calfee, Halter said that one important way to reach that goal is to "provide value, not just stuff," on an intranet. If a lawyer knows he or she is "one click away from a travel expense form," then the lawyer is likely to go to the intranet. He also suggested a "tip of the day" on the intranet, such as "how to insert clip art into a PowerPoint presentation."
Anne A. Balduzzi, a legal and technology marketing consultant in the Washington, D.C. area and a former marketing director at two Baltimore law firms, proposed a number of other steps that firms can take to encourage intranet usage.
First, the design of the firm's home page must be "easily digestible and not too complex," and the information on the site must be current. Thus, if a site has scrolling news, the news must be regularly updated. Balduzzi also said an intranet can have "contests and riddles" as a means of attracting visitors from the firm. She also recommended that an intranet provide information not available anywhere else, such as "local recommended restaurants for meetings and reminders for firm events."
It's a technique that Lowther of Stevens & Lee has used. "We used to send out global e-mail to the firm," she said, but now the firm relies on the intranet to get the content of those messages across. If the firm has new information about its 401(k) plan, it will post that on the intranet. By the same token, global e-mail about "tickets for sale or beach houses for rent" is no longer necessary, given that those items can be posted on the intranet.
One of the key ways to improve intranet usage is training; in fact, Balduzzi said it is necessary to "train repeatedly." Lowther agrees. Before Stevens & Lee launched its intranet, she went to every office and trained everyone in the firm. She also spoke for an hour at a firm retreat. She meets with all new attorneys to go over the intranet in detail and provides refresher courses for the entire firm.
The Future
Whither intranets? A difficult question, but the possibilities seem almost unlimited. Consultant Balduzzi said that despite their recent growth, law firm intranets are underused today.
She sees a time when marketing information is on an intranet and everyone in the firm has the ability to print it out for use as part of a press package, or to send to clients. She thinks databases of press releases searchable by attorney, and archives of announcements, should be on intranets. In addition, Balduzzi said intranets can include request-for-proposal information that is "searchable by date, company and industry."
Imagine, too, having training - from marketing training to litigation training - "available 24/7 with streaming video" on an intranet. E-learning, she continued, might be next; it could be in depth, with testing (such as typing tests) offered.
"Some companies are wirelessly connecting to their intranets," Balduzzi noted, enabling them "to have access to documents and research reports from within a conference room." That can streamline meetings and improve efficiency. An intranet may not be a panacea, she concluded, but a "well-designed and utilized intranet enables firms to have better informed and trained attorneys and staff," and can benefit a firm's internal communications and work flow.
Steven A. Meyerowitz, a lawyer, is the president of Meyerowitz Communications Inc., a law firm marketing communications consulting company that works with some of the largest and most successful law firms in the country. Mr. Meyerowitz specializes in helping lawyers write, produce and place their bylined articles, newsletters, brochures, and other marketing materials, and in integrating publications into a firm's overall marketing program. Based in Northport, N.Y., he may be reached at SMeyerow@optonline.net.
Article originally published in Pennsylvania Lawyer Magazine, Vol. 24, No. 5.
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