As digital technology continues to transform the workplace, and legal supply chains become ever more complex and far flung, a new generation of tools and technology is becoming available which is creating an enormous new opportunity for law firms that are forward thinking enough to tackle the challenge of building a next generation law firm intranet or enterprise network. Given the rapid and continuous changes in the legal marketplace, these new and far more functional intranets may soon prove a key differentiator – no longer something that’s just nice to have but something that will prove to be a real necessity in order for firms to keep pace in the rapidly transforming marketplace.
Let’s be honest though. For many years law firm intranets have had something of a bad name due to the poor ROI realized from the first generation intranet systems that were built back in the early 2000s. Those were often enormous undertakings, spearheaded by the firm’s knowledge management staff, which sought to collect and build taxonomies for vast document and precedent libraries, spanning all of a firm’s practice areas. It was a painstaking process, which required the commitment of significant time and effort in order to assemble and code all those document libraries, in contrast to which the actual lawyer usage of those first generation intranets was often minimal at best.
But in the last five years the technology that drives corporate intranets has been transformed, thanks to the development of responsive technologies, personalization, powerful new collaborative tools, and techniques for social sharing of information among work-group members. In place of the first generation intranets, which relied on top-down information control, and which produced largely static information libraries, the new generation intranet enables multiple information streams from multiple providers to be combined in creating a continuous stream of fresh content that automatically populates the system and where each user can create a completely personalized view of all the latest relevant information. Perhaps more importantly, the focus of the new intranet technologies is on providing a platform for work and collaboration among team members, as opposed to merely providing access to read or retrieve information from a KM library.
Understood this way, the function of a next generation intranet, powered by enterprise technologies, is to establish a virtual platform that essentially holds the law firm together. With an easy to navigate interface, the intranet provides each lawyer with a quick access to his or her current workflow; and it also provides the tools for sharing and managing workflow among members of each working group. Just as the firm’s website reflects the outward face of a firm, the new generation intranet becomes the internal face of the firm, where colleagues meet and legal work actually gets done.
