Law Department Management Blog
A wonderful idea found its way to the innovators issue of InsideCounsel, Sept. 2006 at 65. BMO Financial, a unit of the Bank of Montreal, originally created a legal intranet site in the mid-1990s. Traffic on the site by internal clients of the unit was not as large as some in the law department thought it should be. So, Dougal Clark, BMO’s chief counsel who began the site, innovated.
He asked an in-house group, those who handle cash management services, “for permission to build a ‘legal corner’ on their Intranet site that offers information relevant to their line of business and links back to the legal Intranet site.” Permission granted, the mini-site appeared soon afterward and the idea of “legal corners” spread to the web sites of virtually every line of business within BMO.
The primary legal site now attracts 1,000 unique visitors every month (See my posts of March 27, 2005 on artificial intelligence software made available on an intranet, July 21, 2005 about a law department posting its manual and other material, and Sept. 10, 2005 about charging for help if the answers are on the intranet.).