Multiple law firm / location e-discovery

Legal extranets are a great way to allow workgroups with staff in several locations to review documents. Each team can check out the documents they are working on, yet the entire team can maintain access to the entire document set regardless of the physical office location.

As with traditional e-discovery software packages which used on a local network within a single law firm office, document reviews and codes can assign coding values to documents stored in a legal extranet, and choose to route them to other attorneys if they are hot, of a particular interest, related to a particular topic, etc...

Most typically, these document sets are stored on hosted systems (extranets supplied by outside service providers). Depending on the provider, different and various feature sets are offered. But, one thing is common, which is when the documents are stored within an ASP (Application Service Provider) or hosted solution, access to the document set is typically significantly improved vis-a-vis trying to access documents stored on a local area network via a remote access strategy.

Ad Hoc Reporting On Legal Extranets

Providing a mechanism to allow clients to generate their own reports has proved to be very beneficial. Clients are very appreciative about the fact that they can define reports, run them and export data to Excel and other software packages for use in the analysis and review of the claims and litigations. And, it removes some of the burden from legal extranet providers like us in responding to critical and urgent needs for litigation reports.

I would highly recommend that all legal extranet providers be sure they have a strategy and plan in place to deliver to clients a reporting module to improve and enhance the utility of their litigation support system and the value their product providers in the legal case management system space.