(Vancouver, Canada – December 21, 2009) SydneyPLUS LawPort, prominent supplier of knowledge management software for the legal industry, has just released three key extensions to LawPort 5 for SharePoint.

It turns out LawPort 5 itself is more than an award-winning SharePoint platform for intranets and extranets designed exclusively for NLJ 250 law firms. With the release of the LawPort 5 Extensions, a law firm can now implement much more than an intranet without any additional effort.

"We recognize that not every law firm will have a system in place for tracking deals, experience, or continuing education," says Marcus Liban, LawPort Account Manager, "so we decided to make it easy for a law firm to fill in or expand key areas of their business practices and management while simultaneously moving to a SharePoint intranet."

Here are Extensions that work right "out of the box" for LawPort 5:

• LP Deal Tracker: wins new business from prospects and increases billing to existing clients. It’s a deal management system designed to show the marketing department all the deals being worked on in the firm by practice group, attorney, etc. With the ability to perform advanced searches, save searches, and run reports, the marketing department can easily present the best the firm has to offer to prospects and clients.
• LP Experience Module: provides the firm more information about attorney skills and interests than any standard HR system. It allows the staff to search for experts using their own criteria; at the same time, it is a hierarchical representation of the staff that can be used to ensure important communication reaches everyone whether it is a marketing message or disaster recovery initiative.
• LP Continuing Legal Education (CLE): easily matches the professional development needs of individual law firms and their lawyers. It promotes courses through calendars, personalized pages, etc. and tracks the number of credits, hours, and cost of the courses to ensure that attorneys meet their requirements. With the additional feature of providing a virtual classroom where staff can obtain training manuals, print certificates, and chat with each other, the CLE portal can create a social network within your firm.

"It is typical for a law firm to find areas of improvement when looking for an intranet or extranet, since this exercise is an opportunity to evaluate the structure underneath for deal management, time and billing, experience tracking, etc." points out Marcus Liban, Account Manager. "Unfortunately, it can be time consuming and costly to split the focus between selecting a vendor for your intranet while conducting another search for a vendor to fill your other business needs. But with LawPort 5, you can simply take advantage of the already built in law firm business practice extensions and receive a far better ROI than working through multiple vendors.”

For further information, phone 604 278 6717 or email sales@sydneyplus.com with your questions.

SydneyPLUS LawPort® is the legal industry's leading Web foundation, portal and knowledge management applications suite. At its core, LawPort® provides a complete Web infrastructure, integrating the Intranet, Extranet and Internet sites to unleash and organize critical information previously locked in the firm's back office systems. LawPort's® comprehensive suite of legal applications, including Matter Centricity, Knowledge Management, Proposal & Bio Management, Experience Tracking, SharePoint/.Net Collaboration, and Financial Modeling, provide unique and out-of-the-box value to law firms. For more information about SydneyPLUS LawPort® visit http://www.svtechnology.com.