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39 I L T A N E T . O R G E veryone knows the obvious signs of a tired law firm intranet: clunky outdated interface, built on an unsupported version of SharePoint, completely irrelevant search results, etc. We're not here to talk about the blatant indicators an intranet needs a refresh, but there are several other telltale signs that might not be quite so obvious. We're going to explore each one of them and explain why you should be reevaluating your intranet strategy if one or more of these signs describes your current environment. There was a time when having a properly designed and deployed intranet was only a nice-to-have. That is no longer the case. The explosion of remote work has made it necessary for law firms to ensure that employees have easy access to all the resources they need to do their job. Having a proper intranet has become table stakes in the legal industry, partly due to challenges of the labor market and how, in order to attract and retain talent, firms must establish and maintain a sense of culture. Establishing culture is infinitely more difficult in remote work environments, but intranets can help. Announcing new hires, celebrating work anniversaries and team wins, highlighting positive firm news and facilitating connections between employees all function to create a sense of culture. And maintaining an effective intranet also lets staff know you respect their time. You can rest assured that recruiters are knocking on the doors of your high performers with attractive job offers. For you to maximize retention, employees need to understand and value the culture of the firm for which they work. Otherwise, the decision to stay or go comes down to the highest bid. Unfortunately, there's always someone willing to pay a few bucks more in this labor market. While a high-performing intranet won't solve your retention challenges on its own, it is a key piece of the retention and productivity puzzle. Let's look at some signs that may mean it's time to reimagine your intranet. #1 – It's been five-plus years since your last redesign Innovation in the content management and collaboration space has accelerated in the last few years. There has been a massive amount of investment made by vendors in this space, largely driven by the increase in remote work since the pandemic. Leading vendors such as Microsoft saw the opportunity that the transition from in-person to remote work presented and doubled down. As such, there are capabilities available right now that weren't even in the whiteboard phase five years ago. In addition to the new capabilities today's modern platforms provide, the intranet requirements of your firm have almost certainly changed in five years. Firm processes can and usually do change periodically, and the tools employees use to perform their work need to reflect these new paradigms. Additionally, the overall expectations employees have of their user experience evolves as time passes. They engage with new technologies and user interfaces in and outside of work, so over time a stagnant intranet starts to show its age. Keeping interfaces and content fresh and up to date is essential in maintaining adoption. #2 – Your intranet is hosted on the premises The value proposition of moving your infrastructure to the cloud used to be primarily about reducing data center footprints. Today, retiring hardware is just part of the equation. If your intranet runs on SharePoint Server like those of most firms, you likely have at least three virtual servers hosting your intranet and potentially many more. If you have a development and staging environment, triple

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