File Rooms

More and more, the use of collaboration systems to develop client file rooms is emerging.

As an example, one can use a file room as a sort of brief bank within a law firm to collect best practice documents to allow attorneys to benefit from the excellent work of one another and not have to work to "reinvent the wheel".

Another interesting use is to construct a "client file room", this being a place where a law firm collects all the information related to a large set of cases and places the information in a single, password protected area making it available to authorized personnel.

And a third use would obviously be to collect all the artifacts and documents related to a specific case.

This information is both operationally valuable (it helps attorneys work more productively by sharing useful work product and data) as well as very, very valuable from the perspective of marketing (a law firm can allow a client to log into a portal or they can demo the portal in a WebEx and either way they can make a very compelling argument that by sharing information and working together they truly have the client's best interests in mind and that they are able to provide strong(er) representation at a more competitive cost).

Expert Witness Tracking

We recently completed updated some functionality on an interesting project to facilitate the tracking of expert witnesses. This tracking capability allows law firms and clients to understand the prior work product of expert witnesses as well as to be sure that prior work product is properly used and understood to ensure consistency and to reduce the likelihood of incurring redundant costs for securing the same opinion or same type of opinion multiple times.

The system which we implemented allowed us to track the basics of an expert witness (name, title, address, phone, email, etc.). We also developed functionality to post their resume. Additionally, we developed a method of posting up work product from the experts and associating each file to the case(s) and expert(s) who developed it. And, finally, we also built a method of tracking which experts worked on which case for our clients.