Using Legal Extranet Systems Within Small Firms

Recently I was speaking with several people, all of who thought legal extranets were of use primarily by or exclusively by large law firms and corporations. I think that statement is not entirely true. While it is true that those constituents benefit when sharing information amongst scores of law firms across the countries, I also know of many instances when small law firms (firms with less than five attorneys) use legal extranets for a different reason. The reason is that they totally outsource to an ASP the ability to manage tasks on-line, posting of documents that they wish to use while traveling, putting up simple case calendars and status reports for clients, and many other pieces of data.

This use is far less about collaboration, and more about providing small firms with little or no IT department a way to web-enable key data and documents, but nevertheless is a key reason legal extranet systems might be of interest to smaller law firms.