It is important for General Counsels to manage all their legal activities and to have access to their company’s legal files in one centralized location, rather than sourcing files from different sources and software solutions.
Experts from Canadian Legal Departments of large organizations in Canada identified the need for centralized, easy-to-access information as being one of their top challenges at the 13th Annual Canadian Lawyer InHouse General Counsel Roundtable.
Jeremy Farr, general counsel and corporate secretary at the Bank of Canada, identified record retention and retrieval as being a key issue. Beth Gearing, vice president of legal affairs at McKesson Canada Corporation agreed that record management at her firm was also an issue and added that “we don’t have a centralized contract management software system.”
Visibility of legal files and legal activities is increasingly needed in a corporate culture where answers are expected to be called up on-demand. DiliTrust Governance can give your firm the visibility it needs with secure file management, advanced search capabilities, and other features geared specifically to Legal Departments in large organizations.
A complete 360⁰ picture of all of your legal entities and activities
The Legal Department of any business shouldn’t run on Excel files stored on SharePoint or similar patchwork solutions. While it may be what some employees are comfortable with, it doesn’t provide a top-down picture of all your legal activities. It is also insecure as system administrators frequently do not restrict access to only the employees who need it. DiliTrust Governance solves the problem of centralized file management by allowing you to record and gain access to all your contracts, real estate holdings, cases in litigation, subsidiaries, intellectual property and more.
With DiliTrust Governance, you can:
- Archive legal documents or data and monitor activities.
- Manage all areas of law in a single point of entry.
- Share legal documents and collaborate online.
- Automate business processes.
- Produce custom reports and analysis through an intuitive and easy to use dashboard.
- Fine-tune security management: data access is restricted to the scopes of each user profile.
Organized, Intuitive Dashboards and Simplified Search
Accessing all your companies, stakeholders, contracts, litigation, branches and files is simple with clear dashboards and navigation similar to that of a well-designed website. If you can’t find something, the option is always there to search for it.With DiliTrust Governance, you can easily search for what you need – just like using Google. It even autocompletes your search, so if you can’t quite remember the name of a file, DiliTrust Governance will suggest file names for you as you type.
Technology Frees up In-House Counsel to do Higher-End Work
In April 2017, Jeffrey Shane, general counsel with the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and John West, senior vice-president, general counsel and corporate secretary with Canada Post spoke at the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association (CCCA) national convention in Toronto. Their message was clear; legal teams need seats at the table for any major decision-making and freeing up time to do that through a reduction in administrative work, such as reviewing contracts, is key.
Repositioning Legal Departments as strategic advisers rather than as a place to review contracts or obtain legal advice gives it more value, according to West: “When I joined the organization, I found a legal group that was highly competent, well established, very knowledgeable about the corporation, but a group that nonetheless had to struggle for profile and visibility. We were viewed as a cost-centre rather than a value-add on.”
Technology can play a significant role in reducing administrative work, ensuring that two lawyers aren’t duplicating their efforts on the same file and allowing for instant team collaboration.
Complete Integration and Collaboration Makes Workflow More Efficient
With Dilitrust Governance, everything is centralized, but also interconnected. When you load a contract within DiliTrust Governance, you can see all litigation and files that involve that contract and easily switch to any other documents you need in order to properly review the contract. You can also see who else has been working on the file and its different revisions. Custom workflows can also be built right down to the level of each individual lawyer, ensuring no duplication of work.
Your disparate corporate entities are interconnected but you are also able to look at each onedifferently. This is the collaborative aspect of the platform. For example, when you are working with a specific subsidiary you may need to see a contract, the subsidiary’s stakeholders, or a delegated representative of the company. You can easily switch to another module while remaining within the activities of that subsidiary with DiliTrust Governance.
DiliTrust Governance: A Trusted Leader in Enterprise Legal Management Software
Keeping your legal files and business holdings in one solution allows for complete transparency, accurate reporting, and provides you with control instead of having to cobble together information from different departments and software solutions. DiliTrust has been developing software for corporate and board governance since the 1990’s, purpose-built with the intent to support Legal Departments and C-suite management.
There is no other enterprise legal management solution that provides a similar all-in-one service, while integrating these activities into one secure platform. Contact us today to find out how DiliTrust Governance can make your Legal Department more efficient so they can focus on higher-level projects.
