By Sean McManus
Staff Writer
When Florida law firm Foley & Lardner was selected as one of only two firms worldwide for a recent ranking of the top 100 companies that effectively use technology to integrate people and data to serve clients, it signaled a growing trend in the unconventional ways some firms are beefing up their information technology departments.
Because of the way information is shared back and forth between law firms and clients and between law offices, it makes sense for firms to utilize their own in-house technology experts to build databases and Web sites, according to Joel Sanders, the chief information officer of Leboeuf Lamb Greene & MacRae, a New York-based firm that has an office in Jacksonville.
The idea, said Sanders, is that by providing clients (usually the General Counsel’s office) with online access to case histories and specific legal information, it can save time and money for all parties involved.
Charlotte Logullo, the southeast regional technology manager for Foley & Lardner, who oversees all of the technology development in that area, said that more and more her job is transitioning from networking attorneys at the same firm to networking the firm to their clients and the firm to other firms.
“We had a recent project for a major bank client in Tampa where we developed an extranet the bank could use to pull reports and important documents at any time from their own computers,” Logullo said. “From what I can tell, law firms are frequently expanding into the role of professional services.”
That bank project took Logullo’s tech support staff about two months to complete, something she said was expedited by the fact that Foley & Lardner has the tools in place to promptly engage in technology projects.
“It took about a month to develop the plan and about a month to bring the data live,” Logullo said. “The goal was to allow the bank to pull up items regarding their own cases without having to call their lawyer.”
This is what Sanders of Leboeuf Lamb called a “legal portal,” basically a document repository that is searchable by the client via the Web. And because of the sensitivity of the data, law firms are handling the hands-on technology development themselves.
Richmond-based McGuire Woods uses technology extensively to service clients, according to Scott Cairns, a partner in the Jacksonville office. Cairns said his firm has developed extranets for clients that he uses every day.
“We’ve got big clients that use multiple firms for one case,” said Cairns. “The extranet enables every attorney password access to files on the spot so we’re all on the same page.”
The McGuire Woods Web site has a link to a demo that illustrates the way the extranet service works. “We’ve found that where we’ve gone in a developed a client extranet where all their legal functions can reside, they like it so much that they begin to utilize them for other applications that may or may not be legal in nature.”
Rodney Satterwhite, who is chief counsel and head of knowledge management for McGuire Woods, in a article published last year in “The Internet Newsletter”, said that in addition to online collaboration and enhanced communication, extranets serve to catalog “threaded discussions,” enabling attorneys dealing with similar issues in the future to have, for example, relevant e-mail conversations saved into folders for easy access. Extranets also, he continues, provide access to firm-specific legal advice for questions like “What do I do if an OSHA inspector arrives?”
But whereas Cairns said his firm wanted a lawyer to serve as the chief information officer — as a way to mesh access to technology with the way lawyers think —the CIO of Pittsburgh-based Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, Steve Agnoli, said that his background in business is their selling point.
“For a long time law firms, which were much smaller than the clients they served, weren’t able to conform to the same standards technologically,” he said. “So we finally agreed that it was time to step it up. We want to coordinate our efforts in a manner compatible with the businesses we represent.”
Agnoli oversees an IT staff of 60 people whose goals are to make sure all their lawyers and clients can communicate in real time. “The key has always been communication and access to data,” he said. “It ‘s just that it used to be guys carrying 20 boxes into a courtroom instead of a laptop.”
Agnoli, whose firm was the only other law firm to make CIO Magazine’s CIO-100 list, said that they spend about five percent of revenues on technology, a figure he said was about standard for the industry.
And it’s not all about Internets and extranets. Pamela Phillips, who works in the Jacksonville office of Leboeuf Lamb and serves on the firm’s technology committee, said that her group makes decisions like whether to move from WordPerfect to Microsoft Word, whether attorneys should use Blackberries, whether the remote access capabilities on attorney laptops are adequate, and what level of security to use. “And we have lots of technology clients,” she said. “Our firm is probably better connected than most.”
And not every lawyer is that enthusiastic about law firms stretching the definition of the practice of law. “I think one of the fears,” said one Jacksonville litigator who asked to remain anonymous, “is that big law firms have a tendency to think that dumping every piece of information on a client is the best way keep them updated. I tend to think that the best way to serve a client is the opposite, by extracting only the salient points of a case.”
Another local attorney said that getting your law firm to handle your IT outsourcing is kind of like calling the plumber to fix the air conditioner.
But Foley & Lardner’s Logullo said that it’s certainly been an interesting learning curve. “I thought I was getting into this to hook up computers,” she said. “Now it appears that it helps to have a working knowledge of the law.”