Friday, May 04, 2007 7:00 AM
As I mentioned back in December ( Part 1. The Law Firm DMS of the Future? Sharepoint, Part 2: The Law Firm DMS of the Future? Sharepoint ), it seems more likely than not that the document management system (DMS) piece of Microsoft's Sharepoint products will become a major player in legal, whether it is ready for primetime today or not. Legal is too small a business vertical for Microsoft to directly address it, but its partners will do so in force. As we have seen with the host of third party add-ons for other Microsoft products like Word, smaller companies will deliver add-ons for Sharepoint, including its document management system, that will be specific to legal. Handshake Software and XMLAW are two small companies that already come to mind, and I am sure there are others.
In any case, Brad Feld wrote something a couple weeks ago that I have meaning to mention related to the "stealthy" growth of Sharepoint. In his post, SharePoint - Microsoft's Sleeper Cell, Mr. Feld mentioned a Wall Street Journal article, Microsoft Embeds Sleeper in Business Software sub req'd, that reported [t]o date, largely unheralded, Microsoft has sold 85 million licenses to the enhanced version of SharePoint across 17,000 companies.
Also telling was another quote from the article:
Hawaiian Airlines wants to add collaboration features to its Web site to allow, say, frequent-flier customers to share travel tips and stories, says David Osborne, chief information officer at the airline. Already standardized on Microsoft products, the airline decided to license the enhanced SharePoint software, which it has been using since last month. "It wasn't particularly difficult," Mr. Osborne says. "The thing was already part of your infrastructure."
Both quotes go to the heart of what I believe we are going to see in legal. Yes, there has been significant buzz in the last year, especially among mid-size to large law firms, about Sharepoint. But, this buzz may actually understate the reach of Sharepoint (especially Sharepoint Services). Many firms may have Sharepoint Services sitting in their office, available for little to no extra cost as part of their existing licensing agreement, and simply have not realized it yet. I think this goes to part of the "stealth" and "sleeper" tags being affixed to Sharepoint's growth.
As it stands now, I firmly believe that Sharepoint portal will be the thousand pound gorilla on the lawyer's desktop. Third parties will have to work through, around and with Sharepoint. Because, as the two quotes above point out, not only is the installed (and waiting to be installed) base already very large (giving the product credibility), decisionmakers will increasingly face the choice of a Sharepoint that is largely "already part of your Microsoft infrastructure" versus buying a non-Microsoft product to install and make work within their Microsoft infrastructure. In general, lawyers and law firms are not big risk takers when it comes to technology. There is a reason you see the same two or three products installed for each product category at law firm after law firm. The perception is that there is less risk in following the lead of the majority of other firms. And, of course, the oft-stated addage, "nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft," plays a bigger role in decisionmaking than anyone will ever admit.
If anyone sees a different future for the lawyer's desktop, I would love to hear some more opinion on the subject. Perhaps I am totally missing something. I just don't see another portal product for legal that is positioned to be dominate like Sharepoint. And, for a product that is making such inroads into legal, with such significant ramifications for any legal technology providers wanting access to the lawyer's desktop in the future, it is doing so relatively quietly.