Extranet's defined
Complex Legal Practice Requires a New Computing Platform
The Internet is the Computing Platform of Choice
Teamwork
Performance Requirements for Legal Extranets
ROI of Legal Extranets
References: For More information

Extranet's Defined

This year's legal industry buzzword is "intranet." Intranet's are internal systems that are based on Internet technology that are designed to connect the members of a specific group of single organization. The next "big thing" in law practice is likely to be "extranets" that are specifically designed to support complex law practice. Extranets are extended intranets that connect not only the workers in a single group but workers who are located in different organizations and in different locations who are tied together because they have a common business purpose or objective. We believe that extranets that connect large law firms with the corporate legal clients they serve, can result in new and deeper levels of collaboration and communication, which in turn result in raising the level of productivity of the entire system for creating and delivering legal services.

This is the first of a series of articles on why and how to build specialized extranets that support the delivery of legal services among groups of cooperating law firms and their clients. This article argues that extranets will become an necessary computing platform for complex legal work. A second article will describe the work of actual law firms and corporate law firms who are transforming their "intranets" into "extranets" and explain how to build an extranet for a association of legal organizations such as a group of plaintiff's law firms, or a corporate in-house counsel and the outside law firms that work for it.

[back to top]

Complex Legal Practice Requires a New Computing Platform

Today's sophisticated, complex legal work requires information technology that unites lawyers at different law firms and corporate legal departments into effective working teams. Complex, multi-jurisdictional litigation, such as the landmark tobacco litigation; large-scale acquisitions and transactional work involving several different actors and lawyers from many different supporting law firms; and multi-national corporations with far-flung legal operations are representative of the way complex law is practiced today. To be effective lawyers must work as part of cross-functional, and multi-skilled teams. The idea of the solo practitioner riding into the sunset with a big legal victory may make for good TV drama, but the reality is that complex legal work is the product of teams of individuals -lawyers, paralegals, support staff, and non-lawyer experts--working towards a common goal. Even the solo practitioner who may be invited to participate in a large scale multi-jurisdictional litigation, such as the tobacco litigation, is only one player in a carefully orchestrated team effort. This kind of "team" law practice requires enterprise-wide information systems that are designed to support the work of multiple decision-makers, lawyers working in specialist roles, and the extensive non-lawyer support staffs who are also indispensable team members. 
 

In these organizational environments the boundary between corporate legal client and the law firm that services it, is becoming increasingly diffuse. Re-engineering of the manufacturing process has resulted in customers and suppliers becoming integrated into the corporate decision-making process resulting in faster decision-making, increased productivity, less duplication, and reduced bureaucracy. The legal profession is not immune from these developments; it is just that the legal profession is the last of the knowledge professions to be "re-engineered" by the corporations that pay their legal fees.

[back to top]

The Internet is the Computing Platform of Choice

The Internet is the computing platform of choice to support these complex interactions, for it offers major advantages over its client/server predecessor. These advantages include:

• Immediate deployment of the application to all end users (including those outside of the law firm's firewall)
• No client administration
• The ability to involve clients and other cooperating counsel in extranet applications such as automated litigation support
• Enterprise-wide deployment at a low cost
• Cross-platform and scalability
  

Moreover, the Internet has added two important new dimensions to computing: content and communications. In the past we used personal computers to run applications such as spreadsheets, word processors, and access to specialized data-bases such as litigation document databases. Today we also can used them to communicate and to find and manage all kinds of rich multimedia information (content).
 

The Web's greatest promise lies in the convergence of conventional capabilities, like database access, with content publishing, collaboration and communications. Such convergence will enable the creation of next-generation Web legal applications that are much more responsive the needs of the end-user. Consider these possibilities:
 
 

• · A corporate legal department and its external employment law firm supports the internal human resource advisory function by publishing diagnostic checklists and hypertext guides on the corporation's internal intranet that provide guidance to line managers who make hiring and termination decisions. Line managers also have access to multimedia simulations of appropriate supervisory behavior which is used to train first-line supervisors. All supervisory personnel have direct electronic hot-line access to in-house counsel when additional guidance is needed. Situations that require more intensive analysis are transferred electronically to outside counsel who collaborate in corporate decision-making.

• · A Washington-based law firm monitors telecommunication legislation on behalf of a group of 100 media clients nationwide. These clients require immediate access to information about new legislative and administrative agency developments and look to the law firm to interpret how these developments will affect their operations. The law firm creates an Extranet involving all of its clients that allows secure communications between all parties. The law firm, from the information that it collects, creates individualized and customized newsletters for different groups of clients, which push "content" to its clients using the CDF capability within the web browser. Clients also have access to private discussions groups around particular issues which allow clients with similar interests to explore common strategies under the guidance of counsel. Clients also have anytime, anywhere access to critical documents from a central document store and can access status report on an around-the-clock basis.

• · In complex, multi-jurisdictional litigation, such as the landmark tobacco litigation, where 22 states were represented by more than 60 law firms, there is a need for a well-defined and secure framework for communications and document-sharing among all the parties.

[add other case examples].

[back to top]

Teamwork

All of these complex work environments. where the work teams are composed of individuals from different organizations located in different geographical locations, have a similar need for a computing platform that supports communications and collaboration organized around "matters" and work flow. Next generation web-based applications will combine business logic, database access, on-the-fly content creation and publishing, and secure collaboration and communications and therefore represent a new platform for computing that supports the much more complex interactions between team members that characterized the practice of law by our larger law firms as they deliver legal services to their corporate clients. This kind of law practice is qualitatively distinct from the thousands of small and medium size law in America that serve individuals and small business at a local or regional level. The demands of multi-national practice and the complex nature of work flow between all the participants in large-scale legal work in this environment makes the case for a computer environment based on internet technology compelling.

[back to top]

Performance Requirements for Legal Extranets

The requirements for a platform for computing that supports the needs of large corporate organizations and the law firms that service them include:
 

• to ability to monitor and coordinate workflow between, and among professionals working in different organizations and different locations
   
• point-to-point military grade encryption for all communications among all parties, including digital signature checks and password revalidation for would-be network users at various stages of entry combined with highly granular security to control access to forms, views, Web pages, data tables, individual records, and fields. 
   
• Enable traveling attorneys to retrieve their secured personal workspace over the Internet, whether they are in an airport, a courthouse, at a plant site, or at the client's office.
   
• Access status reports around-the-clock
   
• Enable key attorneys to maintain perpetual contact through virtual conferencing and messaging that could even notify an attorney's turned-off lap top.
   
• Centralization of electronic paper flow into a single document store that enables any attorney or support personnel to access any document, if they have permission, from any location in the system and from any organizational.
   
• Interoperable, so that, the system can run on different hardware platforms that are operating within different organizations.
   
• A customizable, and intuitive interface that is simple to learn and operate, and which can be easily modified for different types of practice without the need of extensive programming.
   
• Integration of existing word processing programs and access to data from legacy systems
   
• Mail integration to automate sending and receiving mail messages. 
   
• Full text retrieval for content searching
   
• Tools to help manage content, delete out-of-date information ,and provide version tracking. Server-side agents to can push content to users to supplement user access to passive intranet web sites.
   
• An interface to industry-leading document management systems to publish documents held in their repositories.

[back to top]

ROI of Legal Extranets
 

International Data Corporation conducted a return on investment study of Netscape intranets and found that the typical ROI is well over 1000%-far higher than usually found with any technology investment. IDC concluded that the cost of an Intranet is quickly recovered-making the risk associated with an Intranet project relatively low and recommended that the sooner an Intranet becomes a core component of the corporate technology infrastructure, the sooner the company can reap the benefits. 
 

Corporate legal departments are charged with managing the organization's exposure to legal liability and creating the legal framework's that further the corporation's business objectives. They accomplish this objective by both managing the work of outside law firms and delivering legal services and legal information to internal management. In the legal context extranets can leverage the ROI payoffs on the organization's intranet, by allowing legal professionals to work more effectively with each when they are at a distance from one another; minimize duplication of work; and allowing tighter management control by clients over the law firm suppliers by more intense monitoring of work flow, billings, staffing, and decision-making. 
 

The components of an extranet generally include network access, servers, web-based-applications, and a graphical user interface. Because an extranet, be definition, connects multiple remote organizations, in a seamless closed-user group, Internet connectivity is required among the participants. The type and speed of access required is directly related to the number of people and the amount of information that needs to be served. The next article in this series will discuss the technological alternatives for creating a "legal extranet" that satisfies the demanding performance requirements of large law firms and corporate legal departments.

[back to top]

For more additional on legal intranets and extranets:

AltaVista Software- A Vision for the (Near) Future
AltaVista Tunnel97
AltaVista Search My Computer
Intranets for Legal Departments- From Sun Microsystems
by Carl Middlehurst, Sun Microsystems Computer Company and 
Patrick Crago, Sun Microsystems Computer Company.
The Intranet for Law Firms: Why Every Firm Should Implement an Intranet by G. Scott Davis
The Complete Intranet Resource
Strategies from an Intranet Evangelist
A Primer on Intranet Technology from Law Practice Management Magazine, American Bar Association, G. Burgess Allison
Netscape's White Paper on Intranets
The Year of the Intranet from Law Practice Management Magazine, American Bar Association, G. Burgess Allison
The Intranet Journal- A Great Resource
How the Web is Used Within Enterprises- An On-Line Tutorial About Intranets from Webmaster Magazine
TrialNet- one of the first litigation management intranets/extranets- excellent example of the use of Internet technology to create virtual law firm networks.

[back to top]

1. Richard S. Granat, JD is the Director of the Center for Law Practice Technology. 
2. David Levine is President of HuskyLabs, a software company that specializes in creating advanced enterprise-wide internet-based software solutions.