Technology Q&A: Portal power

Many firms are now looking at the business benefits of developing a portal. Effective implementation, however, requires a clear strategy, a balance of internal with external needs and a commitment to the content-migration process. Caroline Poynton talks to IT directors Janet Day, of Berwin Leighton Paisner, and Ian McFiggans, of Lovells, about their experiences.

Tell me about your portals. What did you want them to achieve and have you achieved those goals?

Janet Day: Our portal project is divided into two halves – our intranet, InfoCentral, and our client-facing extranet service, Rapport. They both harness information from multiple sources.

The internal service was intended to expand the use of available material and data. Over ten per cent of the fee-earning community have been involved as authors and we have seen a significant increase in user access to the site. Once we had achieved that increase we then added new services – access to data that had been largely unavailable because of the complexity of the access route. We continue to improve the volume of information and service available from the site.

The development was done in-house using MS-standard applications, so we did not buy an expensive portal product to act as our vehicle. Instead, we preferred to concentrate any expenditure on ensuring a top-quality information and document resource.

Given the increase in usage of the site, I do believe we have achieved our initial goals and we continue to leverage more performance and support from this platform.

Ian McFiggans: We are in the process of deciding how to replace our first generation portal with a more up-to-date system. Lovells’s portal (LovellsNet) was implemented four years ago and has served the organisation very well during a period of exceptional growth and expansion. As with any first-generation portal, the system has its limitations and we are just embarking on the redevelopment of the portal environment from the ground up.

The goals are very much still under discussion as the steering committee and project team consider the business requirements, and the current capabilities of the technology available in the market place. There are two overall objectives:

To ensure that the user’s view of data can be customised to their context – regardless of the user’s location, core competence, industry area or interests, the portal needs to push relevant, and only relevant, information to that user;
We need to have clean integration with our legacy systems, and a clearly defined architecture and approach that will enable us to implement further components into the portal at a later date.

How did you convince partners to change to a portal environment?

JD: The project was driven by the enthusiastic support of the board and particularly the managing partner. By changing the default settings for the web browser to InfoCentral, we found that users were quickly converted to use the service because of the excellence of the material available.

IM: Many of the partners, quite rightly, don’t actually know what a portal is. They do, however, each have a clear view as to what it is that they want to see on the screen and how they want information to be presented. The real drive for change came about as a result of introducing a clearer practice stream and regional accountability, where there is a defined need to be able to present both practice area and country-specific information in a meaningful manner.

What are the challenges of evolving from an existing system to a portal environment?

JD: The fundamental challenge was to ensure that the vehicle we put in place was easy to maintain and support, thus giving users the completely reliable platform that they all desire. From there, of course, we had to ensure that the information was useful and properly arranged. A series of roadshow presentations were arranged for each practice group looking at the information that would populate their areas and tailoring the service from what they saw. Involving the fee earners as authors increased their acceptance of the service making it into something they themselves wanted.

IM: Our biggest challenge has been to continue to meet the need for information delivery within a new practice stream and regions structure using the existing product while taking the time to define the strategy, architecture and business case for the new portal solution. There is huge demand for the end product.

What content do you have on your portal?

JD: The content is wide ranging – as well as general firm-wide information, such as benefits, holidays, etc, we added external information like airline timetables and train times. However, this was just the gilding – the real meat was in the practice-group-centric sections, where each key topic had its own knowledge and information tool (KIT). The KIT consists of precedents, key documents, underlying legislation, articles (or deep linking to journal information) and procedural notes. In short, fee earners can find out everything they need on a topic from the KIT.

IM: We haven’t yet reached the point where we have to define the changes that will take place to the existing content. What we have done is agreed the key principles that the portal framework will be owned and managed centrally but the portal content will be under the control of the respective practice streams and regions, and the practice areas and offices within them. This will ensure that the information on the portal is timely and relevant while being contained within the overall LovellsNet framework and architecture.

What are the costs involved and how are they balanced against the long-term ROI?

JD: By using MS products rather than a portal product, software costs have been absolutely minimal. The key investment has been in lawyer time – both by using external consultancy advice and by involving the fee earners. Long term, it is easy to balance these costs against the return. For example, the training required for fee earners has significantly reduced since training material from seminars/lectures are included in the KITs.

IM: We are still at the stage of investigating our requirements. Our research on possible solutions to date has confirmed that the costs are going to vary depending on the route we decide to take. As for the benefits, I think that while it would be possible to develop a business case based on freeing-up part of a lawyer’s day, it would be hard to track the time released as part of the project’s business-benefit realisation phase.

I think that the benefits of implementing a portal come down more on the soft side: creating a better place to work, simplifying internal communication channels, enhancing the organisation’s ability to operate in the global market while retaining a local view. We are also providing greater transparency of information to our clients, simplifying access to information and bringing together information from disparate systems into a single location. Finally, and most importantly, achieving the above in an efficient way for the user.

What do clients expect from a law-firm portal and how have they responded to your portal service?

JD: Rapport is our client portal or extranet service. Our experience is that clients want a range of information. There are core-consistent components – team information, documents, links, bulletins and other educational publications. Then various clients require different add-ons – scanned historic documents, maps and interactive plans, databases and report-driven services, e-instruct, Ask BLP, etc. The response to the tailored service has been very good and a number of clients use not just the secure transactional exchange of information, but also the knowledge base behind it. To date, the acceptance level has been very high, with presentations taking place regularly to key clients.

IM: Lovells has been operating a portal service for our clients for a number of years. Our latest offering, “Mexican Wave”, highlights the investments we are willing to make in this area to both respond to clients and to challenge their current thinking. We are now developing the Mexican-Wave model for a number of clients, including the Prudential and PruPIM.

Mexican Wave provides a simplified access mechanism to quality value-for-money legal services and information, transparency of case-related information to the client, and a work-flow mechanism to control the process.

Janet Day is IT director at Berwin Leighton Paisner. She can be contacted at: Janet.Day@blplaw.com. Ian McFiggans is IT director at Lovells. He can be contacted at: Ian.McFiggans@lovells.com.