Thinking of building or updating your firm’s on-line "portal?"
Can we start by just defining our terms? What is a "portal," after
all, and what strategic objectives is your firm trying to achieve?
According to this article in Legal
IT, there are three ways to approach building a portal:
- start with your own internal document management system and essentially
put it on-line (Allen & Overy took this route); - go high-end, buy, and then customize (and customize, and customize)
a product from LawPort or Plumtree (Morgan-Cole’s choice); or - just start with the basic functionality that comes with Microsoft’s Windows
Server 2003, especially its built-in Sharepoint Services. Freshfields
chose this for a cost of less than $30/year/desktop.
As we should all know by now, the make-or-break issue with introducing
a portal is not the technology platform; it’s lawyers’ pace
of adoption of the new capabilities. And here, Freshfields took
a remarkably common-sense view: Only with Windows Server 2003 is
Outlook an integral part of the portal, and "lawyers live in Outlook." No
cultural ramping-up required.
