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PREMIER KNOW-HOW
New York, NY February 2, 2006
Portals' Promise
contributed by Ron Sharpe
An IT Director boasted about the satellite dish array he installed on the roof of his firm's building and the high-speed cable connecting it to the offices below. "Not only do we get all domestic signals, we get international feeds and we're prepared to scale beyond."
The Managing Partner called him to task: "Why do we need it?", "How do we make sense of it all?", "Do our competitors use it?", "Do our clients need it?", "Does the NSA know about this?", "What does it cost?", and "How do I justify it to my partners who are not information technology enthusiasts?"
The Internet and the tools and capabilities it has spawned raise these questions daily. An ever denser web of connections, contacts, data, documents, and feeds binds us tighter as we struggle to master the flood of data and documents, discern patterns and opportunities, maintain a clear secure path for thinking and working, and manage costs.
Our sense of information overload derives from several factors. First, there is more information due to the Internet, electronic mail, and the increased ease of generating and distributing content. Secondly, there are better tools for detecting the large quantities of information that exist inside and outside a firm. For example, a Google search on the term "law portal" returns "Results 1 - 10 of about 61,700,000". "May I narrow that for you, sir?" Elapsed time for the search is "0.28 seconds". Automated data feeds on new developments in technology or law fill up our RSS readers every morning. Search engines pointed at internal information stores can also quickly return large quantities of data.
As with many challenges, this information overload presents risks and opportunities. The risks include lost or overlooked information and overtaxed personnel and infrastructures. The opportunities include faster, deeper, and more streamlined understanding and communication of complex, heterogeneous data sets that can result from the effective consolidation, confederation, and distribution of information. Consolidation refers to the presentation of information from disparate data sources in a unified, coherent interface. Confederation describes the ability to link diverse data sources for purposes of search and retrieval. Distribution entails the secure and granular sharing of consolidated information with participants in a matter or project, including internal personnel, clients, co-counsel, etc.
Portal software technology is emerging as a cost-effective way to help achieve this consolidation, confederation, and distribution. Software portals have existed for awhile. Yahoo started as a commercial Internet portal in 1994 and Plumtree (recently merged with BEA Systems) was founded in 1997 as a provider of corporate portals. However, portals have only recently begun to gain traction in law firms.
Corporate portals, in general, and law firm portals, specifically, have often been spurned as large, complex, risky, time-consuming, expensive projects with uncertain benefits. However, this perception is transforming with changes in both the business and technical environments. From a business perspective, clients are requesting (uh, demanding) and obtaining increasingly sophisticated levels of electronic interactions with their providers including their law firms. These interactions encompass new matter initiation, status reports, secure Internet access to documents, and electronic billing. From a technical perspective, portal software has become cheaper, lighter, and easier to deploy. A leading example of this technical trend is Microsoft's SharePoint software, which in its basic but still quite functional flavor, is bundled at no additional charge with Windows Server 2003.
Microsoft SharePoint offers a relatively low-cost way for law firms and corporate legal departments to step into the portal arena, assess its relevance to their practice, fine tune its uses, and expand functionality as needed.
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