Rodney Satterwhite said the ‘old’ way of deploying extranets – used exclusively for large matters and designed individually – was reactionary, expensive and did not meet with clients’ needs. “It is an underused solution,” he said. “Vast amounts of clients are not using them.” One of the problems, he said, was that companies were not developing extranets in collaboration with their partners along the supply chain.
But for clients in some sectors of the industry, such as software and dotcom organisations, extranets were seen as the norm and McGuire Woods was among a large number of firms struggling to meet the demand, he said. Some firms had been fired by clients because they could not or would not provide an extranet quickly enough. “Development delays are not acceptable,” he said. “It must be [running] within 24 hours or we lose the business – if we cannot do it fast enough [the client] will find somebody who can.”
