Intranets are one of the hottest topics in legal technology and every firm, whether large or small, should add the consideration of an intranet to its technology agenda. An intranet is a way for attorneys to make accessible information locked away in file cabinets, stored in banker's boxes and lost in the piles of papers on desktops and allow you to share the knowledge of other members of their firms. Intranets bring the power of the Internet into your law office.
Internet? Intranet? What is an Intranet?
It is difficult, initially, to separate the concept of "intranet" from the "Internet." Your confusion may increase when you learn that many intranets connect to the Internet and that some intranets are accessible via the Internet.
In simplest terms, an intranet is an internal website located on your existing Novell, Windows NT or other computer network. As a result, your internal information is accessible to members of your firm as a set of linked web pages. Your users will navigate and use your intranet by means of an Internet browser, usually either Netscape's Navigator or Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the same two programs most of us use to access websites on the Internet.
Since you view your intranet with a browser, you seem to be looking at web pages on the Internet, but in fact you are viewing web pages not available to anyone outside the firm.
Because intranets make information accessible through browsers, users can carry over all their expertise and experience on the Internet to an intranet. The consistency in display and retrieval of information by browsers is where the power of intranets lies and is why people are excited about intranets.
As your users learn to access both the Internet and your intranet using the same browser program, or even access other network documents through a consistent browser interface, you will eliminate the need for multiple programs for different types of information.
A Simple Illustration of the Intranet Concept.
The simplest application of an intranet is the creation of an entry page to the Internet usable by every member of your firm. Many early intranets started out this way.
Here's the problem. Once you give everyone in your firm access to the Internet, some people develop Internet expertise and some do not. Some people put together excellent sets of "bookmarks" or "favorites" (a list of web pages that you have visited which you can organize by categories). If each user keeps a personal list of bookmarks, other members of the firm may be unaware of useful web pages and spend a lot of time unproductively on the Internet.
The solution is to create a single "start page" for the Internet that appears every time that any member of the firm starts his or her browser and accesses the Internet.
This start page will typically have a list of search engines, organize useful web pages by categories and include some tips on using the Internet. This start page is itself a web page and can be as simple or as complex as any other web page on the Internet. It might even contain audio and video.
While the start page and some of the linked pages will actually be located on your network, the lists of useful web pages will be active "links" to external web pages. Click with your mouse on a link on the list and you will go out onto the Internet to that web page. This aspect of the connectivity of intranets to the Internet causes some confusion, but it also is a key aspect of the versatility and power of intranets.
A More Advanced Intranet.
Once you set up a simple start page to the Internet and notice that it looks and acts like any other web page, you'll probably start to think of other things to add to that page. Daily announcements. Updates on firm events. A picture of a new employee. Publicity the firm has received. New cases everyone should know. A link to your Internet usage policy.
You will then be on your way to a more classic and useful intranet. What if when people logged on their computers, their browser automatically loaded and took them to a start page not for the Internet but for the firm itself, an intranet "home" page?
Many linked pages could accessible from that "home" intranet page. Click with your mouse on a link and you go to your firm's Internet start page. Click on another link and you see daily announcements or lists of new clients. Attorney schedules, internal phone lists, employee manuals, training information and employee bios, to name but a few, all might be available with the click of a mouse, just as you would on an Internet web page. And the links could be text or graphics.
Take it a step further. Another link might take you to a list of research memos. You might learn that three months ago a summer associate wrote a memo on the same issue you want to research a few months ago and save yourself two days of duplicative effort. Another link might take you to new cases that other attorneys in the firm believe are worth highlighting. A labor law firm, for example, might have a page that lists various arbitrators and comments or "reviews" about them.
The beauty of an intranet is that it is private and the information on your intranet is not available to everyone using the Internet itself. An intranet also allows you to share the collective knowledge and wisdom of the others in your firm in an easily accessible way.
Building and Maintaining Your Intranet.
Obviously, your intranet will not spring already born like Athena from the head of Zeus. You will probably create "web pages" for your intranet content. In simplest terms, this means creating documents using HTML, the programming language of the Internet. HTML is not particularly difficult to learn. If you are comfortable working in the "reveal codes" mode in WordPerfect, you could become a decent HTML programmer in a couple of weekends.
Fortunately, however, you may not even need to learn how to program in HTML. New versions of Word and WordPerfect will let you save documents in an HTML format and produce simple, serviceable web pages. A great option is a program like Microsoft's FrontPage 98 that lets you create web pages graphically. The program then automatically code the underlying documents and you need not learn HTML.
At least one company, LegalAnywhere (http://www.LegalAnywhere.com), is providing turn-key intranet solutions and focuses especially on the small and medium-sized firm market.
An important concern is determining who will be creating and, more importantly, maintaining your intranet on a daily basis. You will probably want at least an attorney-level person who can work on content and design issues and a staff person for nuts-and-bolts HTML programming and routine upgrades. Because content is so important on an intranet, you will not want to delegate intranet development to an IS person and forget about it.
In a larger firm, with a large and evolving intranet, you might be looking at creating an intranet team or even a new position for running your intranet. An intranet is partly an IS function, but it also has library functions, administration functions and functions that require the insight and oversight of an attorney who understands what attorneys need to know and how best to present it. There are important design decisions that must be made.
The Future of Intranets.
Because the key to an intranet is that it gives you access to data using a consistent browser interface, the thorny issue is what to do with existing databases. It would be great eventually to do things like click on a client's name and find a web page showing the status of current projects, time, billing and other information. How are you going to pull that information from several different programs, put it in HTML format and keep the information up-to-date?
Database conversion issues are, to say the least, daunting. However, the solution will be to avoid data conversion and instead allow your browser to act as an interface for existing databases and, in essence, create web pages on the fly from the data contained in those databases. You will continue to use your existing databases, eliminate the need for a painstaking conversion of legacy data and take advantage of your intranet to access all information. Many of the largest, most heavily-used Internet web pages already are using programs which apply these techniques.
