Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Legal Extranets - they are not just for large firms

We at times receive inquiries from small firms, sometimes very small firms with 1-3 attorneys, regarding legal technology and litigation support extranets.

From these types of firms, the interest is generally a bit different from that of large nationwide law firms or Fortune 500 companies. Unlike the larger entities, who typically are interested in connecting large workteams spanning multiple locations and organizations, these firms are often interested in an ASP type law firm extranet solution which will allow them to outsource some of their key functions (sometimes case management, sometimes task management, sometimes document management, sometimes all of the above).

The general message we typically receive from the firms is that there is an interest in allowing an expert (such as an ASP) manage functions like servers and software, which allows the attorneys at the firm to practice law, not to attempt to practice applications support, which they generally have attempted to do for a while and have tired of doing so. Who can blame them?

These types of implementation often help with another issue -- that being smaller firms struggling to put up properly secured remote access solutions, because if they are able to locate key documents or data at an ASP, the remote access needs related to case management or document management are lessened (or eliminated).