IT initiatives driven by clients’ in-house legal departments were once as rare as the mythical unicorn, but the past two years have seen a sharp turnaround with many corporate counsel expressing a stronger interest in the benefits of specialist IT applications and collaboration technologies. What’s more, there now appears to be a healthy number of initiatives underway to streamline the processes of a corporation’s legal function or to help lawyers more effectively benchmark and monitor the private practice firms that they instruct.
In one of the most wide-ranging in-house legal extranet projects to date, Helena Samaha – legal director at Virgin and general counsel of Virgin Management – has created a group-wide extranet to enhance communication between the lawyers, managers and executives of the many individual companies that compose this disparate and diversified commercial conglomerate.
