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Gretta Rusanow

In-house law departments are increasingly looking to better manage their organisation's legal function by playing a more proactive role in their organisation's business and ensuring that their lawyers deliver consistent, high quality advice to clients in an efficient manner.

The corporate intranet provides in-house lawyers with a powerful tool to communicate with their clients and each other.

The most basic law department intranet site provides a forum for in-house lawyers to market their services to their organisation by providing useful information and services to their business clients.

The basic intranet site should provide a directory of in-house lawyers, policies impacting the organisation, and answers to frequently asked questions.

Beyond providing an organisation with a roadmap of the law department, answers to frequently asked questions and policies will aid in educating clients about legal risks impacting the organisation.

Law departments should also examine using the corporate intranet as a means of delivering a more efficient service to its clients.

Many law departments have developed intranet sites which contain downloadable basic template documents for a business unit to use without requesting the law department to draft the document. Example documents include licence agreements and confidentiality agreements, where the only variables are the names of the parties to the agreement, and thus little value is added by a lawyer drafting the document.

Providing downloadable basic template documents has been especially effective in pharmaceutical companies, where the high volume of requests for basic contracts traditionally placed an unnecessary burden on the law department, causing delays in production of the documents and consequently a frustrated client base. By posting these template documents on the intranet, law departments can control the version of the document used by the organisation, while enabling clients to instantly produce documents.

If your organisation prefers to maintain complete control of the document drafting process, examine building a work request system into your intranet site. Some law department intranet sites utilise workflow technology to accept on-line requests for work by business units.

Once the request has been sent, business units can monitor the progress of that request via the intranet site. This approach has worked particularly well in organisations where clients perceived that their requests for work fell into a "black hole", while the law department wanted to maintain control over the drafting of documents for risk management reasons.

Law departments have also leveraged the corporate intranet to build sites accessible only to the staff within a law department. These "private" sites are used to post sensitive content that should only be shared among law department staff, such as precedent documents and updates in legal matters impacting the organisation.

These private intranets provide an important means of building a cohesive law department that provides consistent legal advice. For this reason, the "private" law department intranet is prevalent among global law departments.

This use of the intranet typically forms the basis of the corporate law department knowledge management system, which provides an integrated view of the various disparate information sources used by an organisation, delivered through a single user interface. For a law department, this will mean access to cases and matters, documents, precedents, policies, people, and legal cost information.

The intranet may source information from a document management system, matter management system, databases, groupware, e-mail, contact management system, and external information providers such as research subscriber services and the Internet. Using a customised taxonomy, the knowledge management system provides lawyers with all information relating to a topic on one screen.
A knowledge management system will enable your law department to leverage the intellectual capital of your lawyers, reduce duplication of effort, and facilitate consistency in the quality of legal services provided to your organisation. This can translate into quicker turnaround time in delivering legal services, as well as a marked reduction in legal spending by leveraging prior work product.

Gretta Rusanow is the Principal Consultant of Curve Consulting, a global consulting firm dedicated to providing law departments and law firms with management and technology consulting services. Curve Consulting has offices in Sydney and New York. Send comments and questions to grettarusanow@curveconsulting.com