Extranet Case Management

Extranets can be a terrific way for corporate law departments to track case management information. They can, if desired, outsource some or all of the data maintenance with respect to their litigations to the outside counsel managing and litigating the matters. This way, when various individuals need to know the status of a case, since the data maintenance is done by those closest to the case and in a timely manner, the case management information is available to anyone who needs to access it.

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 !!

Lowering expenses with legal extranets

Corporate law departments who wish to lower their outside counsel expenses might consider implementing legal extranets.

These systems help lower costs in the following ways.

1) Document distribution. There is no need to overnight or fax documents that can be placed on a legal extranet.

2) Status Report Preparation. There is no need to pay attorneys and previously to generate case or litigation status reports if clients can look information up in an on-line case management system.

3) Reduced research costs. Prior to conducting research, law firms and clients can check against the set of previously completed interviews and research to be sure that the work they are contemplating doing is necessary and has not already been completed by others.

4) Providing a single location to post a trial calendar, thus reducing the need to have multiple entities track this and distribute it amongst all the stakeholders.

5) Providing a single location to post information on a case management or litigation status bulletin board for all parties to a litigation to read and review at their convenience.

Outside Counsel Management

Legal extranets can help corporate counsel track the approved counsel working on a litigation. And, they can also track the list of approved timekeepers (both attorneys and staff) working on the litigation.

They also can provide the capability to distribute messages, via a bulletin board, to all outside firms working on a case. Also, these messages are not only distributed, but also can be stored in a repository so they are available for historical review as a sort of outside counsel policy manual for law firms working on a case on behalf of a client.

This management capability helps to manage and control the costs associated with a litigation, as well as helps to be sure the proper staff (and a consistent set of staff) are representing the client in their legal matter as per agreements reached when the client retained the law firm to represent them.