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

October 20 2005

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."
Great system, low investment cost, and successful:
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."
I'm finding a real resurgence in this.  Met with a customer a few weeks ago with over 2000 "mission-critical" Notes apps, and still growing.  Here's an "SMB-sized" law firm doing the same.  Good stuff.

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

Ed Brill Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Lotus  Add/View Comments [11]

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  1. 1  Shawn Gavin  | 10/20/2005 9:51:12 AM

    Go post Ed. You might also add that Miller Thompson's website is being run on Domino as well!

  1. 2  Ray Bilyk (aka The Lion King) http://www.thepridelands.com | 10/20/2005 12:18:56 PM

    More than just e-mail? Why, that's...that's...

    ...that's 'Thinking Outside the In-Box'!!!

  1. 3  Neil Wainwright www.mobilesignals.com | 10/20/2005 12:50:12 PM

    The Miller Thomson website was converted from 25+ Access tables (I think there could have been as many as 50) and a ton of customized ASP code and different management user interfaces...to a single Domino database with a consistent user interface. Content management is distributed to all Marketing department members across the country. About 4,000 web pages of varying types all dynamically served up with a distributed cluster of Domino servers so that if one region goes down, the other cluster members kick in and keep the website going. :-)

  1. 4  Kevin http://www.DominoPreacher.com | 10/20/2005 3:29:51 PM

    "My experience is that a surprisingly large number of people are not aware of just what it can do."

    That's the quote that really needs to be addressed... and I think up here in Canada especially. I'm flat out amazed by the number of customers that actually think this. I could understand that if the product was new but it's been out for 15 years... with 7 versions and each getting better and better.

    I hear all the time of clients replacing their Notes environments simply based on the fact that their users are more familar with Outlook (heck, I've been involved in 3 just the past 3 months). They've had Notes for years and never jumped on board with it's application capabilities. Sad... very sad.

    Too many times to count up here in Montreal, clients have assumed that I do spreadsheets when I tell them that I'm a Lotus software expert. *Sigh*

  1. 5  Brad Hoyt www.hoytconsulting.com | 10/20/2005 4:03:59 PM

    Notes was never about email in the early days. Unfortunately Lotus and then IBM allowed Microsoft to frame the purchase decision in terms of email and not the real value proposition.

  1. 6  Mike Andolini  | 10/21/2005 9:00:31 AM

    As I remember reading on here, Notes was under 5% in the legal industry. And it was recently reported elsewhere that Cahill Gordon, one of the Top 10 law firmS in size and profits, just made the Lotus to Exchange switch.

    This is a nice story, but a "2 days of programming" and an IT Director in 2005 not knowing that Notes could do more then email isn't really addressing the core issues.

  1. 7  Kevin http://www.DominoPreacher.com | 10/21/2005 9:04:38 AM

    @5- Hey Brad... I talk with a whole lot of clients here in Montreal who only went with Notes because they were originally on cc:Mail. When that went away they simply went with out Lotus' other "mail" solution, which was Notes... and that's all they ever used it for since... I guess that was the easy sell to get Notes into the company but they never had a vision of what it's true potential could be...

  1. 8  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 10/21/2005 10:02:02 AM

    @6 - what would address the core issues? Do you have a link to the report you mention? Also, I think we discussed that 5% number as not fully representative, given that it only surveyed like 5000 US law firms.

  1. 9  Kevin http://www.DominoPreacher.com | 10/21/2005 12:47:11 PM

    I have a copy of that document and just sent it to you.

  1. 10  Brad Hoyt www.hoytconsulting.com | 10/22/2005 1:52:22 PM

    @7 - Kevin, I'm a little hazy on dates, but I don't think the cc:mail users were forced to switch off that product until early in Notes 3.x. So, yes you are correct many just took the Lotus option open at the time. The early adopters (Notes 1 & 2 and maybe even early 3) often didn't think much about the email aspects. I sold Notes into dozens of Fortune 500 departments for applications and not email. Living in the past I know, but I don't think the value proposition has changed since really 1.0.

  1. 11  IT Manager  | 12/6/2006 12:27:22 PM

    Help! My firm is talking about making me switch from Lotus to Outlook. They just don't know the power of Lotus and all that we would be losing. All they keep saying is that they hear of other firm's changing from Lotus to Outlook and they want to do what everyone else is doing. I need proof of other Lotus-using law firms in order to convince them that we are indeed already ahead of the game and should not take such a step backwards as to throw out Lotus! I need help convincing them that Lotus is the smarter choice.