Collaborating Inside and Outside the Office: Client Portals and Intranets

• Author: Dennis Kennedy - Tom Mighell
• Pages: 161-167

161

Collaborating Inside and

Outside the Office: Client

Portals and Intranets

As we discussed in Chapter 17, the client portal is a funda-

mental building block of online collaboration. Its internal

counterpart, the intranet, is also a valuable collaboration tool

for lawyers. Although the client portal is designed to allow col-

laboration outside a firm or organization and the intranet facil-

itates collaboration within a company’s computer network,

both tools share one crucial attribute: to access either, all the

user needs is a web browser or mobile app to access the tools

anywhere and anytime. They also share other common collab-

orative features: document sharing, communications and proj-

ect management tools, resource libraries, and other items that

assist people in working together. Together, they are two of the

most important collaboration platforms available to lawyers.

In this chapter, we discuss client portals and intranets in

more detail, and some of the products available in these areas.

Client Portals

Practice Management Portals

Since the first edition of this book, one of the biggest addi-

tions to the online legal technology community is cloud-based

practice management software. Tools like Clio, Rocket Matter,

and MyCase now offer secure client portals as part of their

standard services. Out of the box, these portals provide client

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