Intranet — a great tool for team collaboration
An intranet is a virtual hub that enables an organization’s internal communication and collaboration. Industries, including legal, rely on the quick discovery of the information; hence many legal firms are rapidly adopting intranets. Law firm intranet is a gateway for an organization to create a complete and auditable digital workplace where lawyers can share knowledge, experiences, and other important announcements. Having a transparent platform is key for effective teamwork and secure document sharing. Intranet empowers law firms with centralized access to tools and information, which lawyers need to complete their tasks.
Intranet modernization to support remote workers
The COVID-19 crisis has led to a sudden transition to remote working, forcing nearly 87% of law offices to work remotely. This has significantly increased the importance of the corporate intranet in the legal industry to strengthen the digital workplace.
Traditional intranets during the COVID-19 outbreak often fail to meet the expectations of remote workers, making it crucially important for law firms to modernize their intranets. Traditional intranets often come with a “one size fits all” model, which makes it an expensive tool for the legal industry.
On the contrary, today’s next-generation intranets focus on simplicity and enable even the non-technical users to set up and use the intranet platform. Modern intranets offer law firms a two-way communication channel, where lawyers can brainstorm and talk about news articles. Modern intranets assist law firms and attorneys in managing their knowledge by providing quick mobile access to a huge chunk of data during the current remote working era. A new modern intranet that can be integrated with solutions like Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint is redefining the intranet site experiences and enhancing the usability. Modernizing the intranet allows law firms to provide a source of truth for employees and streamline communications. Key features that are important for today’s intranet include knowledge management, information sharing, document management, and improved collaboration.
"Modern intranets are shifting legal organizations towards an employee-centric culture."
Key elements of a modern intranet
Valuable and relevant content uploads
A duly updated and relevant content matters the most in facilitating business functions and maintaining employee productivity. In a typical workday, manually updating an intranet with fresh content requires 3–4 hours of authors, whereas a modern intranet fosters easy updating with automation. Smart tools, including content management systems, make it easy to timely update and publish the pertinent content resulting in enhanced author work productivity.
Mobile-driven and people-centric culture
Intranets being a central repository, transmit a company’s culture to its employees. Modern intranet focuses on people’s engagement, which empowers users with push notifications about important updates and announcements. The mobile intranet has made it easier for the law firm employees to access intranet on smartphones and other smart devices, resulting in enhanced operational productivity, employee interaction, and experience.
Navigation
Lawyers often find it challenging to access the information from the intranet as it is stacked with tons of data and takes a lot of their billable time to locate information. Navigation, however, eliminates the long and drawn out procedures, enabling attorneys to easily get all the required information within the intranet. This makes it simple to find team information anytime at the fingertip and can significantly increase the internal collaboration among different departments.
Cloud migration
Law firms have always chosen on-premise intranet for various reasons; however, moving to the cloud has its own set of advantages, including agility, cost savings, and security. The move towards the cloud has made intranet accessible from any location, which has turned out to be an appropriate approach for increasing adoption rates of the intranet. Information stored in the cloud server is maintained and managed by providers and is equipped with all modern security features.
Supports Chat
Intranet has always been known for effective knowledge distribution and employee engagement; however, its continuous upgrades and improper maintenance have led to unsatisfactory adoption. Intranet portal can Support Chatbot and virtual assistants, empowering firm employees to interact and closely engage with other colleagues.
Legal101 — to connect, communicate, and collaborate
Legal101 is on the go mobile-ready intranet platform, which empowers law firms to accelerate employee productivity, enhance communication and workplace efficiency. The platform enables attorneys and practitioners to stay connected and informed with law firms’ updates during the COVID-19 era. Legal101 intranet portal solution is designed for law firms to swiftly deploy modern mobile-first SharePoint intranet. Other than SharePoint, online and on-premise Legal101 can be deployed on Microsoft Office 365. It eliminates the need to develop a costly, risky, and complex customized solution by offering add-ons native apps for iOS, Windows, and Android.
In the present remote working culture, Legal101 supports law firms to provide mobile access to be intranet.
Legal101 intranet platform empowers law firm employees with fully responsive mobile-first and chat-first UI that supports chatbots and enhances remote employee productivity. The platform comes with an AI-driven guided search that allows employees to dynamically search for the relevant information and locate and connect with their colleagues directly. In these times of social distancing, Legal101 is the easiest way to connect and align remote employees, allowing them to collaborate anywhere, anytime. To know more about how Legal101 intranet software can draw more value out of law firms, click here.