Helping corporate law departments manage cases with legal extranet systems

Legal extranets offer companies and law departments a turnkey and cost effective method of managing their legal matters. Companies can subscribe to a legal extranet system and load all their cases for tracking and management. Within such systems, law departments can track the outside counsel assigned to manage each matter, the budget and spend for each matter, information on the plaintiffs in the matters, key dates associated with the claim or litigation, the courts in which the matters will be heard, and many other important case management data points.

Additionally, legal extranets allow law departments to create litigation calendars and task tracking systems and lists which can be shared with outside counsel, to track key litigation documents, to post items on a bulletin board to share amongst the in-house attorneys as well as the outside counsel, and to generate a series of helpful one-click reports so provide all the attorneys and paralegals working on a case with up-to-date information about the case or cases which they are responsible for.

And, since this is a system which is provided by a service partner, the law department need not get involved with any of the overhead associated with running a sophisticated web-based information tracking system (e.g. server maintenance, software maintenance, security considerations).

Generally speaking, as well, because the services provided by legal extranet providers are shared services (multiple companies use the same application code, reporting engines, etc.), the overall total cost of ownership and usage for such systems will be far less than if an individual company would decide to create, operating and manage such as system internally.