As one of the oldest law firms in Virginia, Hunton & Williams LLP, has always been viewed as a technology leader.  Having been one of the first to implement a portal in a law firm over five years ago, we had good ideas about what we needed in our next generation portal.  We found it with a combination of SharePoint Portal Services and one company's software.

With our prior portal, we were able to provide useful administrative information but a limited amount of information related to the clients and matters.  Our business has changed significantly in the last five years and we realized that we needed to deliver a unified and more matter-centric view of practice-related information to provide efficient access for our lawyers.  Improving the flow of information and knowledge to our clients is just one component of our efforts to continuously add value to the delivery of legal services.  Timely access to high-quality information, vis-a-vis our lawyers or online services, helps the firm meet increasingly demanding client expectations.

Our firm has grown to over 850 lawyers in 17 offices spanning five time zones around the world.  Our technology, information and knowledge strategies need to adapt and align with the firm's desire to service its clients as a single global law firm.  One step in meeting this challenge is to create an "integrated workspace," beyond the concept of document-centric extranets, where lawyers and clients truly collaborate on important work regardless of geography.  Obviously these virtual workspaces needed to be constructed with matter-centric or client-centric views of all related information, regardless of the source and present consistent views of client information regardless of whether the lawyer was in Beijing or Richmond.

The firm reviewed several portal offerings that could provide the ability to support our internal and external information and knowledge-sharing needs.  Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Services was selected as the portal platform.

Solving the Integration Challenge
After selecting Microsoft SharePoint, we still needed an approach to integrating and distributing practice-related information stored within our disparate line of business systems.  In our environment, relevant client and matter information could be located in up to 10 different computer systems including the document, docket and case management systems, a variety of litigation support systems and our financial management information.  Rather than integrate each of these systems one by one, our vision was to leverage Microsoft Web Services in conjunction with a common "data-ware" technology to enable simple and reusable access methods to expose information from any target system.

We found a company that shared our vision and with their software, our development team quickly and easily delivered an integrated, related and secure view of all our information in a .Net Web service.  Exposing related matter-centric or client-centric information in SharePoint Web parts, ASP.net pages became relatively simple.  Rather than depend solely upon our vendors, we can easily and effectively produce custom Web parts based on a standardized data set that meet the needs to the firm.  Modifications are simple and based on documented firm standards.

Delivery of Matter-Centric Information
Our team looked at creating fixed SharePoint team sites for each client and matter but quickly realized that creating and administrating so many individual sites would be unwieldy.  We developed a template approach to deliver dynamic, real-time matter and client information to the lawyers in a series of standard and customizable views.  With this approach, we are able to balance the need for standards with a desire to provide the views needed to accommodate the needs of lawyers working in different practice areas.  Today, client, matter, practice and personal views are standardized.  Using basic SharePoint capabilities, lawyers can alter their personal views.   Later this year, our practice areas, currently modeled after "communities," will be designed to dynamically adapt to the specific collaboration and information sharing needs of each practice.

Security of Practice-Related Information
Providing secure access became a paramount concern for us as we contemplated distributing more information on a global basis using SharePoint.  Obviously, the aggregate views within SharePoint needed to respect existing security and access controls.  For example, access to secured documents within the document management system or the varying levels of access to financial information needed to carry over into SharePoint.  The software's architecture honors the security that is established in the underlying application.  As a result, we are able to deliver a matter-centric view to a partner that shows all the related documents, while an associate sees only the same sub-set available within the native document management system.

Our Approach and Launch
As the goal was to not only deliver a matter- and client-centric information system, but to deliver a capability that lawyers would use frequently, it was important to involve them in every step along the way.  Two interview processes involving over 150 lawyers were undertaken to define general information access "pain points" and specific usability challenges with the current system.  From there, content organization, interface design, navigation and search solutions were vetted with a small design team of lawyers representing a variety of perspectives.  Feedback from each administrative team was factored in as well.

As our launch date neared, we created a preview portal that combined the functionality of our original portal with the additional client/matter functionality that we had envisioned.  Once we had built the initial working portal, we exposed this to both the design team, other lawyers and other interested constituencies (administrative managers and senior management) for continuous feedback.  Everyone involved throughout this process was better able to understand why the system was evolving as it was and was actively engaged in shaping the outcome.  The consensus has been that the benefits of the new system included:

• A consolidated view of all relevant client information available from one location in order for partners and associates to quickly understand the prior work for the client
• The ability to research a matter quickly, see all related top level information and be able to "drill down" into more detail or launch matter documents with one mouse click
• A real-time view of relevant information for clients and matters based on the practice area of the user

Our firm-wide launch is scheduled for spring of 2006.  Given the positive feedback of our pilot group and the combination of software resources, we have enabled the development of a solution that is better aligned with our lawyers, can scale as part of several key client services strategies and can grow along with the firm into the future.

About our authors . . .
Jamie Booth is the Director of Information Technology at Hunton & Williams.  His responsibilities include global knowledge systems, practice systems consulting, media and software solutions development, library and e-research services, global network infrastructure, business continuity planning and development, and worldwide technology support services.  Jamie can be reached at jbooth@hunton.com.

Doug Horton is Doug Horton is the founder and CEO/President of Handshake Software, Inc.  He has held senior positions in successful technology and consulting companies including COO/President of CMS/Data, MeltingPoint, Inc., Lawyer's Cooperative Publishing, CompuTrac Inc., Price Waterhouse and Altman & Weil.  He can be reached at dhorton@handshakesoftware.com.