A global law firm gained a planning and billed-hours edge with a new custom SharePoint application, incorporating an intelligent data dashboard, developed by the experienced team at AIS. This custom developed solution continues a rich history of success, as the firm views AIS as their IT project partner and a long-term extension of their team.
Background
The long time AIS client is a top law firm with household name clients in the technology, financial, healthcare and retail industries. They staff more than 1,000 lawyers and offices in 12 cities in the United States, Europe and Asia. This client offers comprehensive legal capabilities for intellectual property, tax issues, real estate, bankruptcy, environmental, corporate law and more.
The Challenge
AIS was initially brought in to build the firm’s global intranet. The project, a SharePoint intranet application, was very successful and user adoption exceeded expectations. Around the same time, the firm hired another company to build a resource application for its main legal practice areas. But because of poor user feedback and bad performance, the application never made it to production. After nearly three years of time and money spent, the firm turned to AIS for help.
Solution
AIS performed an envisioning engagement, gathered the necessary user feedback and created a more comprehensive set of requirements, rebuilding the application from scratch. The resulting system is a large custom SharePoint application paired with an intelligence dashboard.
The application allows resources to be assigned and hours to be forecasted, determines where the heaviest workloads are and what work is unassigned, identifies deep, drilled-down timekeeping per case/practice area, and much more. Because of its size and scope, the project has seen five releases to date with several more scheduled throughout the remainder of the year, and has been a huge success with the attorneys who use it on a daily basis.
Business and Technical Achievements
Being able to see, in real-time, how attorney resources are allocated for every legal case is critical to the success of the firm and their clients. Because of the rich features and data intelligence presentation, the application enables the following:
- Efficient organizational planning
- Organized and manageable accounting
- Accurate billing
- Staffing solutions
- Appropriate resource allocation
Features of the application include:
- Comprehensive data-drill downs
- Hovers that surface data snapshots
- Ajax-rich refreshes
- Auto-fill type-ahead
- Advanced search
- SSRS reporting
Technology
AIS managed this successful implementation by utilizing the following technology:
- AJAX
- Microsoft Enterprise Library Logging Application Block
- SharePoint 2010
- SQL Server 2008 RS
- SSRS
- Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX
- Visual Studio
- WCF
