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Legal Enterprise Collaboration (LEC)
Legal Enterprise Collaboration™ (LEC) is defined as a collaborative platform that enables corporate legal departments, corporate business units and their law firms and vendors to exchange and communicate in a highly intuitive and secure shared environment. This form of a truly collaborative working environment is where the legal industry is headed for many reasons. This form of a truly collaborative working environment is where the legal industry is headed for many reasons. To address this growing demand, legal service providers are developing increasingly advanced solutions. Only a few legal service providers currently have the capabilities, expertise, and dedicated resources to provide this type of stable online platform.

Corporate legal departments are being asked to reduce expenses and increase efficiency. A reduction of 20% is not unheard of. This requires a new way of using legal technology to change the operational workflow of standard practices. One of the most appropriate areas to use this innovative approach is legal spend and matter management. Using LEC technology allows for features and functions to be configured, secured and distributed in ways that allow corporate legal departments, business units or law firms and vendors, to seamlessly work with their partners through a single shared interface. This shared work environment allows for the secure distribution of both content and functionality from internal systems to the collaborative environment. Increasing efficiency and lowering expenses are the tool set of legal enterprise collaboration.

Here are examples of what collaborative functionality can deliver through Legal Enterprise Collaboration platform:

1. Law firms required to enter matter updates on a regular basis. 2. Reminders for updates are either calendared for law firms or issued as task reminders to law firms. 3. Updates when made can be alerted to managing in-house attorneys for review.
 * The ability to distribute select matter views and functionality to discreet internal work groups, law firms, business units outside of legal, and others. This secure distributed and limited access allows the law department to turn over discreet pieces of functionality and/or views to non-law department users. Although any functionality, data and reports available to law department users can be distributed to any non-law department personnel, some of the more typical distributed functionality includes:
 * The ability for law firms to upload documents associated with matters. These documents can be version controlled and are associated with a matter or matters. In-house users and law firm users can then collaborate around documents' progression and finalization.
 * The ability for business units, law firms and internal users, "on a user-by-user basis", to either (a) receive scheduled reports and dashboard views via email, or (b) to access business unit analytics particular to that individual. Security can be based on the context within which an individual is operating or down to the individual field level.
 * Calendar events, tasks, reminders and alerts are distributed via your corporate email application and synched routinely.
 * Law firms can manage budgets, time keepers, accruals and more with alerts, workflow reviews and approvals that go to those within the law department assigned to the matter or task type.

In addition to the ability to allow the law department to distribute views and functionality, thereby sharing the responsibility for management of matters, cases, projects, etc., clients can choose to establish discreet "shared work spaces" via the collaborative portal to communicate with any other partner or team group that have any part in a matter or event. All levels of access for a particular group can be configured using role-specific security to show only what each group will work on in their shared space. Portals or dashboards become the "base camps" for each matter where all resources are assembled and made ready for use via hyperlinks. Integrating all resources in one portal or dashboard lessens the time to accomplish tasks and provides one location for the entire group to assemble critical data required to complete tasks on schedule. This allows for: A single point of entry by in-house users, law firms, business units, partners, and others to access information, functionality, views as well as access to other applications used alone or in collaboration with others, including: • Spend management • Matter management • Litigation management • Time and billing systems • Intellectual Property (IP) management • Instant messaging • Document assembly • Audio and video conferencing • News, events, updates • and more

Shared work spaces can be set up for any number of unique scenarios including different functionality, views, and collaborative partners based on, for example: • Law department work groups • Individual matters/cases/litigation • Individual transactions (E.g. M&A) • Individual law department relationships, such as               Department/law firm Department/business unit Department/functional area

In addition to this existing collaborative functionality, LEC platforms deliver additional collaborative functionality to mobile devices (some of which are available now) and social networking applications which can be initiated and secured based on the law department's collaborative requirements. Legal Enterprise Collaboration is how legal departments, law firms, and legal service providers will interact on a given matter to form the most effective and efficient Legal Project Management process.

Law departments have been slow to embrace new technology in the past, but they are increasing their rate of adoption as it increases their value to their upper management by enhancing individual capabilities with next-generation technology innovations. Utilizing Legal Enterprise Collaboration (LEC), each legal professional can accomplish more while elevating their worth within the organization.