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 !!

Using extranets for complex case management reporting needs

Although many think of extranets now of being SharePoint like systems which do not have the capability of tracking very complex litigation information, that is not the case.

We have many systems in place for our clients where we track information in multiple hierarchical levels. One example is that of a multiple plaintiff case where plaintiffs many have multiple surgeries, or they may have a long work history or a long history of using a certain product or a long medical chronology.

In all situations like this, we start with a single case, attached one or many plaintiffs to a case, and then track a myriad of data points -- many with rows and rows of date-based chronological data -- and then also provide the ability to report on all this data in a variety of ways.

Once you take all this -- and then factor in that we could have hundreds or thousands of like cases -- it becomes a complex tracking system very quickly. It is a far cry indeed from some of the "single screen" extranets we can all sign up for and use at no cost.

Those certainly have their target market and appeal - after all who does not like a useful, free application -- but it should not be confused with the functionality and utility of a complex case management application.

CaseEnsemble PDF Reporting Capability

Xerdict recently developed a new reporting capability within the CaseEnsemble Collaboration System for use in all collaboration systems.

The new reporting capability allows CaseEnsemble to produce any report generated by the system " Query Builder" in a configurable PDF format. To help properly format the reports, CaseEnsemble allows the system users and clients to define the report characteristics such as the report font, font size, and page size and orientation in the PDF file (prior to printing/saving/emailing the PDF file). This new feature, which adds to the existing CaseEnsemble functionality allowing clients to either view the report on the screen or export report contents to an Excel file, greatly improves CaseEnsemble clients's ability to save Case Management and other types of system reports in a useful and attractive format appropriate for printing or emailing to clients. This capability is particularily useful for those case management applications that require periodic reports (weekly, monthly, quarterly) to be sent to clients.