The changing dynamics of our global society and the new-found power for attorneys to collaborate and compete globally – as individuals – in a Web-enabled and wireless playing field, allows for multiple forms of collaboration without regard to geography, distance or soon, even language.

We all know that legal professionals market knowledge to their clients, posing an never-ending IT challenge to set in order the infrastructure to manage and control that knowledge and not impede its flow to those who need access to it.  Ever since Alvin Tedjamulia (former founder of SoftSolutions and now CTO of NetDocuments) went from one legal technology event to another in the late 1980s, evangelizing the value of a DMS, both the software and hardware have increased exponentially to handle the stresses and strains caused by the flood of information the DMS must embrace.  As one CIO stated, "You go in and you spend millions of dollars in software and hardware, and you end up with a big beast in place."

"In 1990, the concept of DMS was revolutionary," observes Mr. Tedjamulia.  "We could save the attorneys hours by finding that one document, that needle in the haystack, provide long document names as opposed to the eight-dot-three character name, and version control.  It is now 2007, and the center of gravity has shifted.  The ubiquity of broadband and wireless networking has changed the nature of how people interact, and attorneys today are increasingly drawn toward the simplicity of services and service-enabled software that simply works, is easy to use and is universally accessible."

In his book, The World is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman writes that the world is shrinking to a tiny size and at the same time flattening the playing field.  Several technological and political forces have converged which have produced:  (1) access to information from all over the world; (2) the ability to interact over the Internet so that projects can be handled globally; (3) uploading - the ability to create content, upload and edit it on the Web via blogs, YouTube, wikis and discussion groups; and (4) open source software development.  As Friedman points out, "The [browser] made the Internet so that both Grandma and her grandchildren could use it."

So now we have Google at our fingertips and music in our ears while simultaneously text messaging our colleague in one state or country as we travel through another.  Just as in the past, as IT leaders and vendors, we need to consider what's going on around us, and reflect upon our strengths, weaknesses and industry leadership responsibilities and respond.  As much as ever, it's clear that if we fail to do so, our business as law firms is at risk.  We must respond quickly and decisively.

Web 2.0 - What It Means for Law Firms
The past year has seen a dramatic change in how developers build Web applications to set the stage for 2007,  a year in which firms and big business are more than ever migrating to the Web as the business network.  While the vast majority of attorneys and their families are playing online with more advanced technologies at home than at the office, firms that have deployed software-as-a-service (SaaS) document and e-mail management services are ahead of the game and no longer stuck in traditional software and delivery models.  They have the latest in Web 2.0 technologies which "go where they go" enabling immediate access to their documents from any Internet-connected device, including their Web-enabled phone.  Technologies such as Google-like searching, AJAX and other tools providing rich user interfaces, SOA, open Web APIs and global user directories are all well-understood parts of the SaaS experience.  Contrast that environment to that of firms locked in a legacy DMS relying on monolithic providers controlling the pace of innovation, with customers waiting impatiently for new features and upgrades and responsible for their own integration and implementation.  And the situation gets even stickier when these vendors get sold off to other technology vendors with agendas that go beyond the interests of the relatively small legal market (as compared to the corporate world), leaving firms in the dark with proprietary software.

Below are three examples of how the SaaS model facilitates the progressive law firm of the Web 2.0-centric century:

1.  DMS Software - No Longer Business As Usual
The traditional model of selling software through up-front fees or long-term licenses is steadily giving way to a model that started with consumers and has progressively worked its way into the enterprise is the services-based model - software-as-a-service (SaaS), which is drastically changing how software is monetized and delivered.  The economics of scale helps firms reduce infrastructure costs and deploy solutions on a subscription basis.  It frees up IT from a lot of manual procedures and costs allowing further innovation to be made.  The increasing ubiquity of broadband has also made it viable, and the proven economics of this model where you simply "just turn it on" has made it profitable.

The LexisNexis and NetDocuments alliance is an excellent case study of providing law firms a natural convergence of information content with the firm's work product, with an underlying mission of seamless integration with additional services such as citation cross-referencing, Shepard signals and other LexisNexis applications for litigation support, etc.  The end result is more efficiency and power to the attorney who has access to knowledge anywhere, anytime.

As traditional institutions of newspapers, television and the music industry are all under attack from Google, YouTube and iTunes, so are traditional ways of managing technology and deploying software being seriously challenged by a new generation of software-as-a-service providers.

2.  Google and LexisNexis Searching Style
Many law firms today are grappling with the challenge of providing faster and more efficient searching capabilities because of the demand by the lawyers.  After all, they get better searching from their Web phone using Google.  And their current DMS searching engine is either too slow or limited, creating even more frustration.  So the quest begins for an enterprise searching engine requiring a large investment, more resources and more time.

Now consider a lawyer who has global access to his documents using the firm's SaaS-based DMS.  He gets "Google and LexisNexis-type" searching, which offers relevancy ranking, snippets, proximity and phrase searching, fuzzy logic, "more like this," multiple language support, all the stuff he gets at home with ease using Google and even his Lexis.com search.  And his IT staff didn't have to do anything.  The vast pool of servers, the indexing maintenance and the ongoing upkeep of the features hums behind the scenes at data centers, 24x7.  Providing "Internet-scale services" is what the lawyer has available to him because the technology is available anywhere, anytime.

3.  The Web-Enabled Phone and E-Mail
Many analysts predict the cell phone is the platform because it's where all content will connect.  Of course we still need the powerful PC and monitor to do real work, but consider what can be done with SaaS from the browser within a cell phone and the phone carriers' enhanced high-speed networks.  We can view documents, e-mail the documents to others, search, browse through folders and view and file e-mail messages to our matter-centric workspaces.

Universally accessing documents is important, but the ability to read e-mail messages, forward attachments, file into the DMS  are all must-have features for the mobile professional today.

These three examples are just a few workflow processes that deliver meaningful experiences and solutions with a level of seamless design that can not be achieved with traditional LAN-based systems. 

The Promise of Web 2.0 Is at Hand
Lawyers want and need to access their work product globally, and now they can.  Increasingly, they're choosing products and services that are highly-personalized, focused on the end-to-end experience delivered by those products and services.  In short, technology that "just works" and can work together, on your behalf, under your control, for your firm and your clients. 

About our author . . .

Leonard Johnson is the VP of Marketing and Business Development at NetDocuments.  He has been involved with document management and collaboration for over 15 years, commencing with his days at SoftSolutions.  He can be reached at leonard@netdocuments.com.