Extra! Extra!

When Stikeman Elliott LLP embarked on a real estate transaction involving over a 100 lawyers and assistants—and close to 500 documents—it could have been facing a maze of copies, faxes, emails, and attachments. With an extranet in place, however, the endless paper trail disappeared. In setting up a private website for the deal, Stikemans was able to provide all parties with instant access to all relevant documents; the firm could automatically track which version of a document was the most recent one; and everyone involved in the deal knew who had seen what.

Extranets are becoming more common at Canadian law firms—and for good reason. “Any type of file can benefit from using an extranet,” explains Stikeman Elliott’s Director of Technology, Venky Srinivasan. The sites are secure—they do away with the need to encrypt emails—they provide ready access to everything relating to a case, and they can be accessed from anywhere by anyone with the right security clearances. A large firm might have over 100 extranets in place—Stikeman Elliott is currently running 121 extranet sites—and even boutiques are beginning to offer extranets to large clients. At Alexander Holburn Beaudin Lang LLP in Vancouver, the firm uses an extranet to keep track of insurance claims relating to one main client. “Because of the high level of claims reporting and the changeover,” explains Alexander Holburn’s Director of Information Technology, John Pater, “an extranet becomes a really good solution.”

Despite the advantages that extranets offer, both Pater and Srinivasan have learned that they can’t be forced on either clients or lawyers. “The process has to be client-driven,” says Pater. “We tried firing one up, and the client wasn’t interested, they wanted to deal with paper transactions and face to face communications.” And it’s not just clients who are sometimes reluctant to embrace new technology. The extranet, says Srinivasan, “is not something that’s going to come naturally to a lawyer. It’s a change in practice. So you require lawyers within the firm who are going to champion this practice and who are going to market it internally as a best practice.”

Once a green light has been given to extranet use, Pater stresses that it’s important to involve the client at the outset. A firm has to be able to show the client a rough outline of how the extranet will function, and when it comes to building the site itself, “you need to involve the client and make changes as you go.” Pater acknowledges that the “front end” work of building and designing the extranet is time-consuming, but he stresses that—once the site is in place—costs are recovered, since lawyers will save time that would otherwise go into faxing, emailing, and checking to see who received what.

At Stikemans, the extranet is so fully integrated into the existing document management system that lawyers don’t even have to spend time uploading documents. All document revisions and calendar changes are “seamlessly published” to the extranet, meaning that the extranet is always up to date and clients always know that they’re looking at the most recent version of a letter, schedule, or timeline.

In offering security and ease of access, extranets are already proving themselves useful, and they’re likely to become even more central to legal practices in the future. At present, documents housed in extranets are edited by one person at a time, but Srinivasan sees this changing: “The extranet is going to be a space, a virtual space, where you and I can actually collaborate on the same document at the same time.” When extranets finally do emerge as virtual conference rooms—allowing three or four people to participate in a document review process on-line—they’re sure to become increasingly indispensable to large and small firms alike.

From National Magazine, September 2007.