Legal Current

Editor’s note: Guest blogger Andrew McLennan-Murray is an applications integrator for Thomson Reuters, Legal.

Over the last 5 years, SharePoint has taken the legal industry by storm. Today, most firms have SharePoint installed, whether they use it as their primary intranet portal or in another capacity. Microsoft’s SharePoint is mostly known as a content management system and portal. Three firms set out on an exploration of what else SharePoint can do in their ILTA 2010 presentation, “SharePoint as a DMS: From Heresy to Orthodoxy.”

Loeb & Loeb presented their hypothetical thinking around SharePoint as a document management system (DMS). The firm’s current intranet leverages SharePoint 2007, which they chose due to its ease of use, ease of administration, and ability to organize content and clearly target internal audiences.

They say after their successful implementation of SharePoint as a content management system they began to question whether or not it could be used as a DMS and if they even needed to have a traditional DMS anymore. They decided to reassess what it was they wanted to get out of a DMS in the first place. Based on their research, they came up with the following:

-A DMS should give attorneys the ability to retrieve their document data quickly and accurately.

They asked themselves if they could use SharePoint to accomplish that goal, and they came to believe the answer was yes. Loeb & Loeb will be rolling out SharePoint 2010 in the near future and plan to test it as a DMS.

The approach that firm Clifford Chance took was to find a way to improve the way they view and share their content globally. They worked with Microsoft to determine if SharePoint 2010 could be used as a matter-centric DMS. One of the biggest challenges they faced was with SharePoint’s lack of integration with Microsoft Office.

They spent a great deal of their development time on addressing this issue and believe they have been able to successfully adapt their attorney productivity tools to continue to function within their SharePoint workflow. They plan to proceed with a pilot of SharePoint as a DMS this year.

Like Clifford Chance, firms who have implemented SharePoint have typically put a lot of work into integrating it with their enterprise systems. Integration with an accounting, HR, or CRM can take time and effort to accomplish, but the rewards can be great. Rich meta-data and functionality can be added by such integration; firms who have accomplished this are looking to leverage these assets into other workflows.

Document management systems would also naturally benefit from these types of data and features, but this might require significant investment on the firm’s part, repeating some of the integration they’ve already performed within SharePoint.

Using SharePoint as a DMS is still uncharted territory.

Those firms who are willing to challenge their definition of document management might reap great rewards for their users. The firms participating in the ILTA panel were all very enthusiastic about their individual implementations and look forward to adding powerful features for their end-users. Only time will tell if firms will migrate to SharePoint as a DMS or if they will continue to use traditional standalone applications.

Andrew McLennan-Murray
Applications Integrator
Thomson Reuters, Legal

Posted by Andrew McLennan-Murray in: In Practice | Technology and innovation |