Push Technology

Several years ago in the information technology field there was a fad known as "push technology". The theory behind this technology was that it would be wise to push content of interest to your clients rather than depending on them to proactive access your website content.

The concept proved to be somewhat annoying to some computer users -- not unlike internet popups now -- since people don't like to have information they do not wish to see thrust upon them.

Law Firm Portals, however, offer some of the same services as push technologies but without the annoyance. This is because your clients who are accessing the law firm portal are doing so because they want to see some of the content on the site. What the portal is doing is attempting to capture the attention of your client during their voluntary visit to your portal so that other important law firm marketing information and messages can be shared with your client.

Positioning a law firm to get top-tier business

The largest companies in the United States -- Fortune 100 Companies -- are accustomed to conducting business on the internet. They manage their financials, their payroll and benefit selections, their research and development, their pension and 401K plans, the system security and administration, stock options, their patents and trademarks, their manufacturing, and countless other business functions using internet technologies.

Best-in-breed law firms must be positioned to do the same. Providing a client with a website containing electronic versions of documents such as invoices, firm procedures, firm marketing pieces, case summaries, trial exhibits, etc. is critical to demonstrate that the firm is using technology to provide the most value to a client at the lowest possible cost. Websites such as this are known as law firm portal sites -- especially those providing administrative (i.e. non litigation documents) to clients -- since systems providing litigation documents and information to clients are commonly known as "legal extranets".

Law firms that provide both legal extranets and law firm portals to their clients are moving down the right path to help ingratiate their law firm into the fabric of the biggest and most sophisticated companies and organizations in the world.

Overcoming email filters

Legal documents are often very large sized files, since they are many pages and often scanned documents which are much larger in size than an equivalently sized Word or Excel file.

This often leads to issues and problems sending them across organizations. Many companies have implemented email filters that limit the size of files that can be delivered to company employees. This, at times, makes it very hard for employees to receive large legal files (especially if the sender does not understand how to compress a file with software such as PKZIP).

Law firm portals help deal with this problem, however. Portals using top-tier relational database packages (such as Oracle, SQL Server, etc.) can easily accommodate large PC files. They can be posted up on law firm portals and have authorized client can access the file and download it to their PC. File downloads, unlike incoming attachments on email messages, are not typically filtered by size.

Using law firm portals thus can provide an easy mechanism to share and exchange very large PC sizes when the exchange of such files via electronic mail is prohibited by organizational controls placed within the email system of a corporation.

Law Firm Portal Security Considerations

Here are a few best practices to ensure your data and information remains secure.

- Create different environments, with separate URL's if possible, for each client.

- Assign each client user a unique ID and password.

- Encrypt data with an SSL certificate as it flows over the internet.

- Adopt internal procedures to ensure data and information is reviewed by at least two staff members prior to posting it on a client's web portal.

- Ensure that your server resides in a locked and attended data center.

- Ask a company or individual specializing in internet security to review your "internet zone" technical architecture to be sure your firewalls are properly protecting data from hackers and internet intruders.