The Globe and Mail: Lotus position a big comfort to legal firms

Wow, great story about how a Canadian law firm with nine offices and 450 lawyers is using Lotus Notes as their knowledge backbone:

For the first 16 years of his career in high tech, Richard Van Dyk thought of himself as a Microsoft devotee. But when he joined Miller Thomson LLP in Toronto two years ago as national information technology director, he experienced a flash of IT enlightenment after studying the Lotus position.

"I always thought of Lotus Notes as just an e-mail system," he says. "But when they [Miller Thomson] asked me to create a legal knowledge management system to be shared by all nine offices across the country, I was stunned. Lotus Notes is much more than e-mail."

The system has proved extraordinarily popular, Mr. Van Dyk says, and the cost was negligible. The only outside expense was two days pay to the programmer.

The realization that there is indeed more to Lotus Notes than e-mail is not an isolated incident, says Peter O'Kelly, Boston-based senior analyst at Burton Group. "It's a common misconception," he says. "A great many customers bought Domino and Lotus Notes as an e-mail platform and are not using them to their full advantage . . . My experience is that a surprisingly large number of people are not aware of just what it can do."

Originally by Ed Brill from Ed Brill on October 20, 2005, 6:09am