Deposition Schedules

Using law firm client workspaces or legal extranets for the purpose of publishing schedules of depositions is a excellent use of this technology. It enables all parties to see the upcoming depositions (where, when, what time, etc..) and, if desired, the legal extranet could also post the transcriptions of the depositions to all system users or a subset of the legal extranet system users.

Many other types of events, like client meetings, updates, trial dates, court appearances, hearings, etc... can also be posted in a collaboration calendar.

This is a somewhat small or narrow use of the entire set of available legal extranet functionality, but in many litigations it is a very helpful way of publishing what often is a very dynamic schedule.

Ten Great Reasons To Use Legal Extranets

1) For corporate law departments, this is a great way to have on-line access to the status of your cases, legal documents or case/trial calendars.

2) Legal collaboration systems provide anytime, anywhere access to case information and documents, wherever an Internet connection is available.

3) This is a turnkey (Application Service Provider or ASP) solution, there are no servers to set up and there is virtually no technical assistance required to set up a new collaboration system.

4) Collaboration systems can track many things -- cases, litigations, practice support projects, vendors, budgets, etc....

5) Easy tracking and documentation of system updates and other data activity.

6) For law firms, this is a great way to provide incremental services to clients.

7) Sophisticated security and data permission modules, so you can specifically control who has access to various types of data.

8) Every collaboration system is highly customizable and can be individually updated so that the feature set and graphics are set up in a manner consistent with the law firms and clients using this system.

9) These systems are delivered with user-configurable reporting modules providing reports which can be output on the screen, in spreadsheet format or in PDF format, providing many ways to report on and distribute your data.

10) Collaboration systems help you work more productively with your business partners !!

Document Libraries

Client workspaces and legal extranets are ideal locations to post litigation support document libraries.

Why?

Data can be added by any party - authorized law firms or clients. Or, you can constrain entry to authorized individuals and prevent data manipulation by certain team members.

Data can be easily added - there no longer any reliance on IT professionals to post up information which is no longer timely by the time it is posted to the site. And this includes data or virtually any type of attached file.

And, assuming the legal extranet technology is a robust and modern relational database package, these systems can easily hold thousands of documents totaling many GB's of data.

Legal extranets also facilitate litigation support by allowing full text searching of exhibits and posted documents. And, of course, documents can be searched by assigned keywords or by the title of the document.

There really is no need in today's technology world to email CD's back and forth or to use cumbersome virtual private networks or other methods of sharing data. On-line, client workspaces containing case management data, trial exhibits, discovery documents, depositions, transcripts, manuals, memos, etc.. are far more effective and convenient methods of posting up contact for collaborative use between law firms and clients. It is wise to consider using robust litigation support systems such as these to host and publish large litigation document libraries.