Internet Newsletter for Lawyers
March/April 2006, by Delia Venables

ALEX – an Intranet Experience at Law South
by Anne Bailey

Law South,www.lawsouth.co.uk, is a grouping of 10 major law firms in the South of England, formed in 1988. The firms have collaborated on a wide variety of business and managerial initiatives that have substantially improved business practices and development as well as achieving considerable cost saving.

Law South Group Ltd (Law South) is a service company wholly owned by the 10 member firms and is based in Chichester. It employs 7 members of staff, is financed by an annual contribution from the firms, and is managed by a Management Board comprising the 10 managing partners or their representatives. Its role is to carry out research and consultancy and to manage the various collaborative initiatives within its remit.

Examples of co-operative projects we have undertaken include Professional Development, Risk Management, Extranet development and Special Interest Groups.

An Extranet

One of the more active Special Interest Groups has been the Librarian and Information Managers group, and about 5 years ago, before access to the Internet by fee-earners was commonplace, this group, under the chairmanship of the Law South Director of Professional Development, conceived the idea of a joint project to provide web-based information in a tailored way. It was to be financed from an “underspend” of the previous year’s contributions and therefore the budget was limited.

The objectives of the project comprised the following:

  • To bring web-sites of interest and relevance to lawyers together into a single, easy-to-use site.
  • To add value to these sites with comment and internally developed information.
  • To provide a vehicle to disseminate information from Law South (on our other activities) to the widest possible audience of member personnel.
  • To provide an on-line booking facility for our professional development events and training courses.
  • To improve communication between member firms by providing discussion forums for special interest groups in fee-earning and practice management departments.

    The Information Group designed an extranet site to meet these objectives and provided, between them, the web links and text content to populate the pages. It comprised:

  • Daily Updates – daily newsfeeds on legal, financial and general news items, provided by a third party service.
  • Information Resources – collections of relevant websites, including business information, professional directories, legislation and government information, journals, data (such as Bank Rates, RPI etc, including historical figures) and other miscellaneous items (such as train times, exchange rates, Streetmap etc).
  • Practice Areas – information and discussion forums specific to each legal and practice management discipline.
  • Training – information relating to the Law South training services, and on-line booking for events.
  • Law South – contact information about the member firms and the group, and its functions as a central secretariat.

    The website was developed and hosted by ActiveLawyer www.activelawyer.com (formerly GoInteractive) and included an administration function which allowed authorised users to add to and amend the information, directly onto the internet, within the designed framework. Responsibility for updating the information was divided between the firms’ Information Officers and Law South staff as relevant. We designed the look and feel of the site to be clean and simple.

    The site was controlled by username and password access, both to identify the individual user for the purposes of on-line booking, contribution to discussion forums, etc, and to protect the value added and private information from general public access. There was no intention to allow clients to access the site, although the training programme was made available to external users via our public site.

    We went live in Spring 2002. The Information Officer in each member firm was responsible for planning the rollout and ensuring that users had the necessary username and password. We visited all firms and demonstrated to groups of users, showing them the features and explaining the rationale and the potential benefits. After that it was largely down to internal staff to encourage and assist users.

    What happened?

    Everyone we showed the system to, and everyone we spoke to about it expressed interest and enthusiasm, and thought it was potentially a very valuable tool. In particular, the following features have proved very successful:
  • The on-line booking of training courses.
  • The provision of precedent policy documents and guidelines to support our risk management initiatives.
  • Agendas and minutes of special interest group meetings.
  • Discussion forums for support department managers.

    Users in support departments have been particularly keen and used the system a lot, especially Information Managers and IT Managers and HR and Training departments.

    The enthusiasm generated by this project helped to encourage individual firms to develop their own intranets, and although this has meant that much of the information on ALEX has been duplicated locally, it provided a learning curve along the way and, even if for that reason alone, it had immense value to everyone.

    What Next?

    Now that firms’ own intranets are coming on line, usage of some features of ALEX has reduced, and recently, we have decided to reduce the scope of the site and to concentrate on maintaining the remainder as a central information resource. Meanwhile we are starting to plan a new public web site to meet our future requirements, which will aim to include the important elements of the Extranet’s services.

    At the time of its conception, ALEX was an innovative and progressive project. However, some 5 years later, its time has probably passed because the Internet is now being extensively used anyway and the firms’ own intranets are covering most of their needs.

    However, we feel that the lessons learnt in preparing the site initially, and subsequent reviews and maintenance of the content, have been valuable. ALEX has improved communication between the firms at various levels and has taught a number of valuable lessons to be borne in mind when we come to develop a successor, in particular that the time and resource needed to keep such a site up to date and attractive must not be underestimated!

    Anne Bailey is IT & Systems Manager for Law South and is responsible for all systems within the office as well as co-ordinating any IT-related projects involving the Group as a whole. Email Anne.Bailey@lawsouth.co.uk.

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