Outlook interface

When selecting an extranet product, be sure to ask if the product can import data from Microsoft Outlook. Many law firms track legal tasks or a legal calendar within Outlook and you want to be sure that the litigation calendar and task data entered in Outlook can be imported into the legal extranet product you are using to communicate information about cases and incidents to clients.

Ready-to-use sites

If it is easy to do with your law firm extranet solution (and if there are no incremental costs), consider building law firm extranet sites for all of your key law firm clients. By doing this, you can ensure that there is always a collaboration area ready to use at a moment's notice by any of your key internet clients (partners).

Doing this also helps reduce the perception or the belief that setting up additional law firm extranet environments is a costly and time consuming endeavor.

Email notifications

Legal extranets often are used to store large volumes and numbers of documents. To make sure that new documents do not get lost in the shuffle of tracking and managing many documents, systems can be configured to automatically send email notifications to team members as documents are added to the system. With these notifications, which should contain a hyperlink to the recently added document or file, team members can be automatically made aware of updates to the system (such as new transcripts, memos, pleadings, etc.).