DLA Piper shows Athena intranet as a SharePoint model for pro bono and legal-aid teams

Elizabeth Capance, director of knowledge management at DLA Piper, described Athena, the firm's SharePoint-based knowledge platform, as a central, flexible intranet that organizes resources by matter to make precedent collections, templates and training readily available to lawyers and pro bono teams.

Capance said Athena began as a way to make internal resources easier to find and later was adapted for the pro bono team, organized by matters they support. She cited uses such as a dedicated immigration counsel portal with trainings, sample documents and forms, and an in-progress prisoners'rights resource library intended to support assigned counsel nationally.

Athena leverages SharePoint's document libraries, metadata columns and views so users can filter across folders (for example, by document type, fiscal year or partner organization), enabling rapid retrieval of documents that otherwise would be scattered across email and individual drives. Capance also described a cautious approach to GenAI pilots: an infosec and data-privacy review, required ethics CLE, responsible-use acknowledgements and training before staff gain access.

DLA Piper invited legal-aid organizations to consult on technology choices or to reuse elements of Athena; the firm said it has shown the platform to pro bono clients as a starting point for their own knowledge intranets.