Successful Extranets Start With A Focus On Your People

Matthew Daniel and Peter von Elling

How often do you hear something like this? Your client has a case involving participants across the country (class action lawsuit, M&A transaction, major contract negotiation, etc.). As lead counsel, your firm manages the case. Not only must your firm coordinate court dates, filings, due dates, etc, with local counsel, but also it must organize the mountain of information generated in the form of pleadings, discovery, orders, contracts, agreements and the like. And by the way, your client demands real-time access to that information.

So how do you do it? An excellent method is to use a web-based collaboration tool such as an extranet—a secure web site for sharing documents and information among your firm, clients, and co-counsel. Web-Collaboration tools currently on the market can create hundreds of extranets, each for a specific client, matter, project, or event, and organize each according to common principals. We will refer to individual extranets within a web-collaboration tool as a project extranet.

Project extranets provide tremendous time and cost savings, and therefore substantial ROI; offer significant benefits in case coordination; and are an easy, inexpensive, and robust means of communication with your client. The ingredients for success include:
• people performing the right roles;
• training, best practices, and procedures supporting the people; and
• the right extranet software.

In this article, we will discuss how those ingredients combine to create a successful project extranet and a well managed case.

Tools Are Useless Without the Right People

Firms successfully using web-based collaboration tools have people who fill three vital roles:
• the Organizer,
• the Filter, and
• the Advocate.
Your success will likewise depend on finding those people within your firm. Don’t worry, they are already there, you just need to identify them. They may be a paralegal, attorney, or a case manager, and they may perform more than one role.

The Organizer: Above we noted just a few types of information in a typical case that need to be logically organized. This is the role of the Organizer, who manages a project extranet’s information by maintaining a coherent, logical structure suitable to the case, simplifying search and retrieval. They are case managers (or project managers) and paralegals, knowledgeable experts in organizing cases, contacts, deadlines, and documents. Managing a project extranet is a natural extension of their present duties: add training and encouragement and you have your Organizer.

The Filter: Think of all the drafts and irrelevant documents that appear when you search for a particular memorandum. The Filter is an attorney or paralegal that knows the case intimately and can correctly judge the value of a given piece of information, judgments they make all the time. For whoever fills the role, two simple rules for placing an item on an extranet are:
• who else needs to see it, especially from outside your organization; and
• does it has value to the case or project at hand.
The Filter then coordinates with the Organizer to make sure the right information resides on the project extranet.

The Advocate: To many, using a web site to share discovery documents, due dates, and contact information simply does not occur to them. The Advocate overcomes our collective lack of imagination, sharing this new vision of collaboration with clients, co-counsel, partners, associates, paralegals, case managers and secretaries. The Advocate doesn’t need to be technically skilled, just wise in the ways that an extranet can improve service, increase coordination, and produce better work overall.

Support People with Training & Best Practices

With the right people in place, you need to support them. Training, best practices, and setting reasonable expectations for what can be accomplished with a project extranet are the formula for success.

Train, then reinforce with practical experience. Successful firms train their case managers in the extranet application, then have them create and administer a project extranet for a case they are to manage. This way, training is reinforced with actual experience. You may also consider training clients and co-counsel who have experience with extranets but may not be familiar with your particular application.

Set expectations for what a project extranet can accomplish. Educate users on the features, functionality, and limitations of your web-collaboration tools. Extranets do not offer litigation support features nor are they a document management system. Rather they are a means to securely share information, collaborate, and communicate across time, distance, and organizations.

Create Your Own Best Practices. What cases or projects qualify for or need an extranet? Who should be included? How are they notified? What are the guidelines for posting documents, contacts, dates, etc? At what stage should a document be “published” on the project extranet? Firms who use extranets successfully develop best practices, guidelines, and policies for creating, organizing, administering, and retiring project extranets. Common guidelines ensure consistency among your firm’s extranet projects, essential since attorneys, staff and clients could be members of numerous projects. Publishing practices safeguard against unapproved drafts or sensitive documents being available to clients or co-counsel. Furthermore, best practices provide continuity as personnel change.

Create an extranet culture. Successful firms have developed an extranet culture, where using project extranets for appropriate cases and projects is commonplace. A client opens a new matter, you create an extranet project. You will find people can easily adapt to this new environment through policy, procedure, training, and reinforcement.

Choose Wisely

Lastly, your choice of the proper tool directly affects how well you can manage a case using an extranet. Extranets often go unused because uploading information and managing it is cumbersome and laborious. Good web-collaboration tools make transferring and managing information easy. Vendor support is equally important from initial design and implementation to maintenance.

Is the application intuitive with helpful features? Good Web-collaboration applications have intuitive interfaces that use conventions similar to applications people already know, such as folders, tabs, and lists. Because attorneys and practice support staff typically have numerous cases, your web-collaboration application should provide:
• an overview of all project extranets;
• easy access to the newest items; and
• a synopsis of new items since the last login.
Subscriptions, where users receive email notifications of additions or updates to content, should be under user control for delivery and timing to avoiding “spamming oneself.”

Is it easy to upload and download files? To overcome many shortcomings of extranets, good web collaboration tools integrate with desktop, network, and enterprise applications. Sophisticated web-collaboration applications let users upload or download items to a project extranet from within Office applications like Word, Excel and Outlook. With this added convenience, an attorney is more likely to share items through the extranet with the legal team. Furthermore, look for the ability to transfer multiple files, a significant time saver.

Does it allow you to organize information that best suits you? Since every case and project team is different, look for flexibility to organize information in a way that fits the case. Perhaps you want to initially store documents on a network drive or in a document management system. A well designed extranet application is capable of extracting documents to the project extranet according to predefined rules without manual user intervention.

Will the vendor help with the non-technical aspects of using extranets? Web-collaboration tools are not shrink-wrapped software. The vendor should go the extra mile to help your firm work in this strange, new environment, and should be well versed in the best practice issues we identified above. Rather than install and run, look for a vendor who will partner on your web-collaboration strategy.

A Higher Level of Client Service

The benefits of using web collaboration tools, specifically extranets, are enormous, but often go unrealized. Firms who successfully use web-collaboration tools place priority on people and effective practices before the product. Identify those people within your organization as the Organizer, the Filter, and the Advocate and support them with training, best practices, and the right extranet tools.

Furthermore, extranet projects are an inexpensive—yet premium—service for your clients, keeping them updated and informed through very unsettling times. Properly managed, web-collaboration tools provide a higher level of client service. So not only is case management a breeze, you forge an strong, long-lasting relationship with your client.

Matthew Daniel (mdaniel@sagesol.com) and Peter von Elling (pvonelling@sagesol.com) develop and consult on portals, web sites, intranets and extranets for SAGE Solutions Group, a technology management consulting firm in Washington, DC.