The idea isn't really to limit what Davis & Kuelthau employees can access online, since the firm's specialties range from labor relations, litigation and corporate law to finance and environmental concerns. It has to do with the liability to its clients and productivity of its people, according to Drier. The goal is to keep an eye out for users who abuse their Internet privileges by frequenting chat rooms or downloading and sending massive or inappropriate files unrelated to their work, such as the digital tree.

Davis & Kuelthau runs Elron Software's Internet Manager, which records the URL, time of access and the pages loaded during each Internet session of each user, and provides a list of the top 10 Internet users. The application also generates reports on individual users to spot trends. But Drier says there's no Big Brother because the information is confidential and never used unless a problem is detected. The data is discarded after 60 days, and only once has it led to an employee's job termination.

The tool comes with a filtering function, but it isn't enabled because it could block content too broadly, which is problematic for a firm such as Davis & Kuelthau, which frequently handles sexual-harassment cases. The concern is that the software would filter out not only inappropriate sexual content, for instance, but sexual harassment-type information, too. "We don't trust the software to make the correct judgment 100 percent of the time," Drier says.

Davis & Kuelthau runs the monitoring software on a Microsoft Windows NT Server connected to a 100BASE-T hub, which sits behind its Internet router. "It has to be plugged into a hub instead of a switch so it can listen to all the traffic," Drier says. The software listens for Web and FTP traffic, and POP mail too, but only for statistics gathering. Setting up the filtering system, hardware and software cost the firm about $6,000. "If it saves on the expense of a lawsuit or terminates a nonproductive employee, then it pays for itself," Drier says.

The next logical step is monitoring and filtering e-mail, which is the firm's biggest traffic generator. Davis & Kuelthau could then inspect key words in messages and files, and the size of file attachments. "I would love to have a messaging package send out e-mails with JPEGs, GIFs and MPEGs only at night," Drier says. "Web usage isn't what clogs our network--it's e-mail."

But as with Web monitoring, the trade-off of monitoring e-mail and other traffic is that by nature it's intrusive. Drier says the best kinds of tools are the most hands-off. "We would jump at any monitoring utility that doesn't interfere with normal day-to-day" traffic and operations, he says.