Choosing the right intranet developer is one of the most important technology decisions your firm will make. The wrong developer produces a system your attorneys will not use, or worse, a system with compliance gaps that create real professional responsibility risk.
The right developer produces an intranet that becomes a foundational operational tool your team relies on every day. These seven questions help you evaluate any developer with the rigor the decision deserves.
The 7-Point Checklist
1. Is the Team Attorney-Led or Legally Informed?
This is the question that matters most for law firm intranet development. An intranet developer who has never practiced law, never managed a conflict screen, and never worked inside a firm does not know what they do not know about how legal organizations actually function.
An attorney-led development team brings professional-level understanding of ABA confidentiality obligations, conflict rules, privilege protections, and ethics compliance to every architectural decision. They ask different questions, catch different risks, and build different controls than a team implementing specifications without that background.
Esquire Interactive is attorney-led. Our team includes attorneys who understand these requirements as professional obligations, not configuration checkboxes.
2. Do They Have Specific Law Firm Intranet Experience?
Ask for examples of law firm intranets they have built, the size and type of each firm, and specifically how they addressed ethical wall architecture, matter workspace design, and ABA compliance requirements in those projects. A developer who has built intranets for general businesses but not law firms is starting from scratch on the requirements that matter most.
3. Do They Build on a Platform Your Firm Already Uses?
A developer who asks you to adopt a new technology platform creates additional cost, training burden, and long-term dependency. A developer who builds on Microsoft SharePoint, which most law firms already access through Microsoft 365 licensing, uses infrastructure your firm already pays for and that your team already has some familiarity with.
Ask any developer what platform they build on and what the long-term technology dependency looks like. Understand what happens to your intranet and your data if you ever want to make a change.
4. Who Owns the Code and Data After the Project?
Your firm should own your intranet completely. The code, the configuration, the content, and all data should live in your firm’s own environment, not on a vendor’s servers. If your developer requires you to host through them or retains any intellectual property rights over custom-built components, explore those terms carefully before signing.
At Esquire Interactive, everything we build lives in your firm’s Microsoft 365 environment.
5. How Do They Handle Ethical Wall Architecture?
Ask your developer to walk you through exactly how they design access controls to enforce conflict screens. Can they describe the specific SharePoint features or custom components they use?
6. What Does the Integration Approach Look Like?
It can be desirable for an intranet to connect to a practice management system, document management system, and potentially billing software. Ask which specific systems the developer has integrated with, how those integrations work technically, and how they handle system updates that could affect integration behavior over time.
Esquire Interactive has experience linking with Clio, MyCase, Filevine, iManage, NetDocuments, and other commonly used legal software.
7. What Does Ongoing Support Look Like After Launch?
Your firm will add attorneys, open new offices, change workflows, and need new features over time. Many of these tasks can easily be accomplished internally by your staff. That being said, it is still important to ask what post-launch support the developer provides, what the process is for requesting enhancements, and whether there is a support retainer or if each change is a new engagement.