City law firm Stephenson Harwood last month launched a major client portal initiative. The firm’s IT team worked alongside systems integrator ANS and portal implementation specialists from Novell to get the service up and running. According to Stephenson Harwood’s IT director, Chris Petrie, the most remarkable thing about the project was the unprecedented interest taken in the firm’s portal strategy by IT supplier Hummingbird.
Stephenson Harwood is no stranger to the grind of running extranet applications for clients. The genesis of online services at the firm came about in the summer of 2000, when clients began asking the firm to provide a transactional extranet. Stephenson Harwood promptly delivered this, but with the firm’s first offering the onus was on the end-user to tweak the application to their liking and this caused a few small problems for Petrie and IT departments at client organisations. By this time the firm had put all its documents into a stable document management system (DMS) from Hummingbird, but had not begun to lever the knowledge held in its databases. Petrie says although the ‘back end’ of the DMS was good, the front end had become out of date.
