This article was downloaded by: [DUT Library]On: 06 October 2014, At: 06:27Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

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The Evolution of a LawFirm Intranet: A Librarian'sPerspectiveAlfred H. Holmes MA aa Greenberg Traurig in Miami , FL, USAPublished online: 17 Oct 2008.

To cite this article: Alfred H. Holmes MA (1999) The Evolution of a Law Firm Intranet:A Librarian's Perspective, Legal Reference Services Quarterly, 17:3, 49-59, DOI:10.1300/J113v17n03_09

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The Evolution of a Law Firm Intranet:A Librarian’s Perspective

Alfred H. Holmes

The emerging role of technology in the Law Library has been awidely recognized trend for some time now. The increasing relianceon computers and online services has generated a need for law librari-ans who are technologically competent to the degree that the linebetween the library and MIS is often blurred. Today’s law librarianneeds to be comfortable and competent with more than just catalogingbooks and tracking down a pertinent case. As a provider of informa-tion, it is the role of the law librarian to exploit any and all effectivemethodologies to disseminate needed and useful information to ourattorneys.

We are all familiar with the old cliché that if you want somethingdone right, you’ve got to do it yourself. Designing a web site is nodifferent, and yet many people shy away from taking an active role inweb site development because they don’t know how to program, can’ttell the difference between html and http or simply feel they don’t havethe time required to learn a whole new trade. I’m not going to go so faras to advocate firing your MIS technician, but I am going to try andshow how simple and easy it can be to create web pages, whether it bea single home page, a medium-sized web site or a large corporateintranet with dozens (or hundreds!) of pages. And for those readerswho are not overly comfortable with computers, fear not: the best partabout designing great web pages these days is that you will never needto write a line of computer code.

The purpose, then, of this article is two-fold. First, to describe the

Alfred H. Holmes, MA, served two years as Library Technician at the law officesof Greenberg Traurig in Miami, FL. Proving the old adage that no good deed goesunpunished, he has recently been promoted to Coordinator of Internet Affairs.

Legal Reference Services Quarterly, Vol. 17(3) 1999� 1999 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. 49

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development of our corporate intranet, from its humble beginnings tothe hydra-like behemoth it has become. Second, to discuss and explainsome of the technical aspects of creating an intranet. Those readerswith any appreciable experience designing web pages, and especiallywith Microsoft’s FrontPage software program, will find the treatmentof these techniques to be somewhat fundamental and basic. Neverthe-less, the point here is to describe how such a project can be successful-ly undertaken and implemented with minimal prior experience, and soit is to those readers that the technical explanations are targeted.

A number of programs are now available for web page design thatare as easy to use as a typical word processor. For our corporateintranet, we used Microsoft’s FrontPage 97 as the workhorse of ourpage design. Throughout this article I will discuss numerous featuresof this program useful for creating unique and professional lookingpages; most of this discussion will apply equally well to FrontPage 98,which has been on the market since December 1997. While I am notpersonally familiar with the majority of the html editor programs onthe market, most, if not all, have similar features and capabilities tothose I will discuss here.

Other necessary software includes some sort of graphics program.We primarily used Adobe Photoshop, but there are numerous graphicsprograms available that will suffice. Microsoft FrontPage 98, for instance,comes bundled with Image Composer, a functional graphics program.While a minimal amount of expertise with such a program is desirable,it is not necessary to play the role of graphics specialist and design allthe images on your web site from scratch. As much as possible, utilizethe vast resources of free clip-art and other free images already extanton the Web. After copying images from other sites, it will often benecessary to resize or otherwise alter them for incorporation into yoursite and this is where you will get the most use out of your graphicsprogram. To be sure, there will be instances where designing an origi-nal image will be necessary, but even here, modeling your image offsomething someone else has already done on another web site cangreatly ease the task.1

Hardware requirements can be quite minimal as well. A computerand a modem (or other connection to the Internet) at the very least isenough to get you started. A scanner is highly recommended, and maybe essential depending on the types of information you intend to placeon your intranet. For photos of staff members or office sites, locations,

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etc., a scanner is necessary. Finally, a web server is required. Andagain here, with the right software and setup, your personal computercould serve in this capacity. On this topic, I will refer the reader totheir MIS department, as the focus of this article is designing websites, not publishing and hosting them. With that said, let us now turnto said focus.

We initially designed our intranet as an internal web site for ourlibrary. It has since grown into a resource spanning all facets of ourfirm and its operations. The beginnings were humble enough. Ourinitial goals were to set up easy access for attorneys to a set of usefullinks to sites on the web: Thomas, Joshua, the SEC, the IRS, etc. Evennow, these links remain the heart and soul of the library’s presence onthe intranet, although this is falling off as sites for individual practiceareas are designed and brought online.

At this point, remembering a time before desktop access to the Webwas commonplace at our firm is difficult. But back in the days whenonly a select few were surfing the Web, we established a set of guide-lines for the use and access of the Web. This ‘‘Internet Handbook’’was created with two main goals in mind. First, to offer a writtenpolicy for the firm’s use of the Internet, and second, to guide andeducate our users in the proper use of the Internet. Our Handbook hadchapters covering a brief history of the internet and the WWW, list-servs, netiquette, and basic Internet terminology. Along with the links,this Handbook was one of the first reference items placed on ourlibrary site.

The original library site contained some basic information aboutwhat the library could do for its users; services we provided, as well asdatabases and resources we could access on behalf of our users. Weincluded background information such as where and how servicescould be accessed, associated costs, and the type of information avail-able from a particular service.

Finally, the library staff was represented through individual photosof the staff members, along with respective job descriptions. Again,this was intended to satisfy several goals. Our firm is a multi-officeenvironment, with ten offices in four states. Despite a strong depen-dency on frequent phone and e-mail communication amongst loca-tions, it goes without saying that many people working for the firm arevirtual strangers (no pun intended). By placing photos of the librarystaff on the firm wide intranet, we hoped to break through this barrier

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and give the library and its staff a more personal appeal to our users.We also felt that putting job descriptions of the individual staff mem-bers online would facilitate more calls, e-mails, and general inquiriesdirectly to the staff member most likely to be of help to the user,whether it be the staff member who pulls all our docket sheets or thelibrarian who specializes in international law.

Thus it began. Our initial site had minimal graphics, and reallynothing more technologically sophisticated than hyperlinks, both in-

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ternal within our site and external to the WWW (all designed by alibrarian who had never written a line of HTML code). Our intranethad been designed using Microsoft’s FrontPage, and while the originalrelease of this program sufficed for the construction of the initial sitedescribed above, this release wasn’t capable of much more. FrontPage97 arrived just in time to allow our intranet to keep growing andbecoming more sophisticated while avoiding the headaches of actuallyprogramming. While the thought of programming may cause manyMIS personnel to salivate, it is not something traditionally thought ofas a strength of your typical law librarian.

In its infancy, our library web site was cutting its teeth at the sametime our MIS department was doing the same with setting up andrunning a web server. In fact, the library web site preceded the exis-tence of the firm intranet. It was initially set up to run on a desktop PCin the library, accessible to anyone who knew the IP address. Sincethere was no ‘‘firm intranet,’’ either in reality or in developmentaldiscussion at this point, our initial site was really a guerrilla web sitewhich we were at pains to advertise to our users.

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This situation did not change substantially for many months, but letus fast forward from fall 1996 to spring 1997. By now the firm had astable web server up and running, with desktop web access for attor-neys. The Internet and web-based browsing had finally started topenetrate into the minds and work habits of our attorneys, to the pointwhere the potential usefulness of a firm wide intranet had been recog-nized.

We began with the recognition of the need for some sort of consis-tent navigation tool that would be present throughout the entire site.We considered a simple button bar at the top of each page, but endedup creating a link list along the left margin of each page. This decisionwas based both on our modest efforts to model our page somewhatafter some other professional looking sites with a similar structure,and also because we felt it did in fact look more aesthetically pleasingalong the side. Initially we designed this without the use of frames, butthen whenever the viewer scrolled down a long page (or any pagelonger than one screen in any case, which most are), the navigation baralso scrolled off the viewing screen. This defeated our intention, andso we were forced to utilize frames.

Frames do complicate the site design a bit, but not overly so and theFrontPage 97 program was able to handle them fairly well. We set up abasic template for all the pages on our intranet that consisted of twoframes, split vertically with the left frame fairly narrow and the rightframe much wider. The narrower left frame holds our navigationimage map in all the pages of the site, while the larger right frameholds the information specific to each individual page.

Once the basic layout of the pages was settled, we focused oncontent. Here, the first decision was to determine the major parts of theentire intranet with the intention of putting these major heading group-ings as the links in our main navigation menu. The trick was to coveras much territory in the navigation bar with as few links as possible, soas to keep things clean and streamlined. The understanding being thatmany if not most of our target audience had little or no experiencewith the Web. Therefore, another of our underlying considerationswas to make sure that the site was as clear, simple, straightforward andself-explanatory as possible.

A link to the Library site was an easy first choice, since at the time itwas the only substantial set of pages and information available.Coupled with the goal of putting as much background and supporting

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information on the intranet as possible, we focused first on the othersupport departments of the law firm, rather than the legal departmentsthemselves. Using the existing firm Policy Manual as a guideline, weco-opted both its structure and content to large degrees. And while thePolicy Manual was eventually placed on the intranet in it’s entirety, weinitially broke it down and used it to create sites for Accounting,Administrative Services, Human Resources, Library, Marketing, MIS,Records Management and Training. At first these sites consisted oflittle more than the information straight from the Policy Manual, andthere was little need to have both them and the Policy Manual online.However, the goal was to create online resources and structure for ourviewers, with the intention of eventually fleshing out these departmen-tal sites with both more and different kinds of information then wasavailable in the Policy Manual. While we planned on eventually ex-ploiting the technical benefits of html presentation as much as pos-sible, again, our initial intention was simply to present said informa-tion in a format (i.e., a keyword searchable web site) and place (i.e., attheir desktop) that would be accessible to all members of the firm.

Of course, we were not ignoring the legal departments entirely.Preliminary meetings with interested attorneys from a few depart-ments generated some useful ideas. For instance, one environmentalattorney who was by now also a veteran web surfer, volunteered anextensive collection of links, with an obvious inclination towards en-vironmental issues and resources. The was quickly turned into a webpage with a list of these same links, a resource that was now alwaysand easily accessible to all our attorneys firm-wide. This was one ofthe first instances of using the work of someone else, a practice thatsoon became commonplace as the design and maintenance of theoverall intranet rapidly expanded beyond the time or capacity of acouple of individuals. As time went on, individual legal departmentsites expanded by incorporating articles by departmental attorneys,useful phone numbers and maps, court directories and motion calen-dars, etc.

Other areas that needed immediate attention were the daily firmnewsletter and the phone list. In addition there were some other fea-tures we wanted to incorporate, such as an online event calendar, a sitemap and areas with information specifically targeted towards the attor-neys and specific information on the firm travel policy. And althoughwe incorporated all of these items into our main navigation bar, we

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were, in fact, unable to get all of these features up and running satis-factorily by the time the intranet was officially presented to the firm.

This just underscores two salient aspects of this type of project. Thefirst being the need to plan ahead by anticipating potential or actualfuture developments and additions so as to accommodate them into theoverall site in a seamless fashion. Second being the realization that anopen-ended project of this magnitude is bound to be an ongoing pro-cess, with continual additions, modifications and alterations. To besure, an intranet could be designed and rolled out initially in its finalform, but it would be nothing more than a static resource with aninherently finite life span. And certainly this philosophical approachundermines the most advantageous benefits of the html platform.

At this point we had settled on a list of links for our site navigationmenu. To activate the links we utilized a common web page feature:the image map, which is nothing more than a single graphic imagewith multiple links. The main navigation menu we used for our intra-net is an obvious case, with each of the ‘‘boxes’’ in the single imageindividually hyperlinked to a separate page. Other image maps are lessobvious, without clearly defined link spots. Nonetheless, any imagecan be used as an image map, and this was easily done with FrontPage97. Nor did the linked areas need to be constrained to any particularshape or size. For instance, two image maps in our Library site madeextensive use of polygonal linked areas. The first was a group photo ofthe Library staff. We set this up as with linked areas that traced thecontours of each individual member of the staff. Simply clicking themouse on any part of any of the staff members took the viewer toanother page specifically dedicated to that individual, with a separatephoto and a description of their job duties. The second polygonalimage map was a line drawing of the United States. In this image wetraced linked areas around the borders of each of the individual statessuch that each state on the image was now a link to a group of usefullinks to resources specific to that state.

Another feature of the FrontPage 97 program we utilized extensive-ly was the Include WebBot. This macro-like feature allows a webdesigner to incorporate one web page into another. For each of thedepartmental sites, we designed an individual set of navigational but-tons. Combined with a departmental header graphic, these two fea-tures could be saved on a web page which then, using the IncludeWebBot, could be automatically included on several other pages.

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The Include WebBot offered two great benefits to large site design.The first was that by having many pages incorporate the contents of asingle other page, any changes made to that source page will automati-cally take effect on every child page. This was a very convenient wayto make alterations throughout the entire web site without editingevery page individually. The second benefit of this WebBot was sim-ply an extension of the first, in that the properties of the source pagewere carried over to the secondary pages. In this case, this means thatthe hyperlinks we created on the individual navigation buttons wereactive in every page that ‘‘included’’ this source page. Without thisfeature, the Include WebBot would get the image of the navigationbuttons onto all the pages, but we would still be forced to create thelinks from the buttons individually on every page. Again, the IncludeWebBot saved an inordinate amount of tedious work.

For us, another timesaving aspect of FrontPage 97 was its highdegree of compatibility with the Microsoft Office products. At thetime our intranet development was beginning, our company was wellalong into a transition to using Microsoft Office. FrontPage 97 was notas seamlessly integrated into the Microsoft Office package as its corecomponents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc); nonetheless, it did offersome nice compatibility options. For instance, hyperlinks could be setup within your web pages that link directly to Microsoft Office files.Despite its many excellent features, FrontPage 97 did not import orotherwise convert Word documents very well. The less sophisticatedformatting the Word document has, the better FrontPage 97 couldhandle it. Fairly plain text documents without much in the way ofindentations, columns, tables, etc., converted well enough and did notrequire undue amounts of post-conversion clean-up. But for long doc-uments with advanced formatting techniques, the conversion processwas fairly poor and subsequently required significant clean-up withinthe FrontPage 97 program.

Here then we were faced with two choices in constructing our site.For information that required hyperlinks and such, it was simply nec-essary to take the time for the conversion and clean-up. However, forfiles meant primarily to serve as reference information, or read-only,we could set up links to the Word files directly, and thereby avoid theconversion process. When the link was clicked, the Word file launchedin a Word window within the browser program, and could then be read

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by the viewer. Alternatively, we could choose to have the file open in aseparate window, or within a frame of the web page.

The conversion of Microsoft Excel files was much cleaner andtrouble-free than Word files. An Excel spreadsheet could simply be cutand pasted directly into a web page, and FrontPage 97 would convertthe spreadsheet into a table structure more or less reminiscent of theoriginal layout. Some clean-up was usually necessary, but minimalcompared to a complex Word file. PowerPoint files could be linked aswell.

Still another situation where being able to link directly to the origi-nal Word file was of great use was for existing forms. Forms designedin a word processing program tend to have complex and exact format-ting that is ruined when converted to html. The ideal solution to thiswould be to convert the form into .pdf format, especially if it were tobe posted on a external internet site as this would allow the form to beviewed and printed exactly as it was designed by any browser pro-gram. .pdf format is the proprietary format of Adobe Acrobat, andwhile the Adobe Acrobat Reader (necessary to view .pdf files) pro-gram is available for free all over the Web, the Acrobat programneeded to actually create these .pdf files costs several hundred dollars.With the integrated functionality available between the Microsoftproducts, a much simpler and cheaper way to make a form available tothe users was to simply link from FrontPage 97 to the original Wordfile, which could then be opened, viewed and printed in its originalformat.

FrontPage 97 was capable of generating and handling its own formsas well. While this was of no help with previously designed formswhose use was commonplace within the company, any new formscould be created directly in FrontPage 97. The intrinsic drawback tolinking to a form still in Word format is that it could only be viewedand printed. Filling out the form online and submitting it electronicallywas not an option. But forms indigenous to FrontPage 97 could besubmitted online, thus avoiding both the need to generate paper copiesand the time delay involved with returning the printout to the appropri-ate personnel. FrontPage 97 made creating such forms both quick andeasy.

That was how our intranet began: simple and straightforward. It hasgrown tremendously in just the first year and a half of its existence.Photos of staff members, scanned images of reference handouts, and

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departmental-specific Frequently Asked Questions pages are all in theworks for every department, with much more planned.

As is so often the case, the fear of the unknown keeps us fromrealizing our potential. While there was a time when non-technicallibrarians had cause to fear the esoteric world of html code, that timehas passed. The proliferation of user-friendly web design products hasempowered those whose backgrounds lie in areas other than computerscience. Indeed, once the gentle learning curve of web design is over-come, the real hardship of developing an intranet is in assimilating andorganizing information on the web site. And isn’t that an area wherelibrarians have always excelled?

NOTE

1. In no way in any of the above statements am I advocating either plagiarism orthe breaking of any copyright laws. Use of proprietary material or ideas is to beavoided. However, since its inception, web page design has thrived on the generoususe of other people’s freely available resources, be they graphics, freeware, share-ware or otherwise. And there is nothing wrong with modeling your work after otherweb sites that you feel are particularly well done or otherwise applicable to yourneeds and goals.

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