C&W finishes IT brief

INTRANET: telecoms company links up its 53 lawyers

Telecoms company Cable & Wireless has completed an overhaul of internal technology for its in-house legal team, enabling its 53 lawyers and 24 support staff based around the world to share their resources and information - without using any external contractors.

Over the past three years, the C&W in-house department has developed the extensive legal intranet site using internal expertise and a so-called 'e-enablement' committee made up of members of the legal team from around the world.

Bertrand Alexis, vice-president and associate general counsel, speaking at the Economist General Counsel's summit in London last week, said: 'This demonstrates that much can be archived by in-house teams without the need to buy in external IT solutions.'

The new system enables lawyers to gain access to a database on external advisers used by the firm, including details of possible conflicts of interest, terms of engagement, fee rates and annual spends on each firm.

Other features include specialised client and committee room pages - used to discuss legal issues between groups of executives within C&W - which can be password protected, legal training data and an on-line library.

The firm has set up a site that uses active server pages (ASP) code within the HTML code of each page to extract information directly from Microsoft Access database tables.

Mr Alexis gave some tips to other in-house departments trying to launch their own intranets.

He said: 'Establish responsibility within the department for pages aimed at internal clients, and establish links between their intranets to the legal intranet.

Start simple - with contact information - and let enquiries from the internal clients determine how the intranet develops.'

He said that although IT could not replace the key legal function, 'applied effectively in the department, it can leverage scarce legal talent to provide the highest value to the corporation'.

Jeremy Fleming