You’re the head of an in-house legal team. You have, perhaps, a half-dozen or a dozen colleagues to share a growing burden. You could, of course, farm out much of the heavy-lifting — the research, the drafting, the seemingly endless searches and updates — to outside counsel, but that comes at a heavy price, one that your bosses are less and less interested in paying. And with that eye to the bottom line, they’re not likely to look favorably upon requests for additional staff, let alone 200 additional and highly experienced staff.
Yet that’s exactly what you get with Thomson Reuters’ Practical Law Connect. The innovative new platform unites Westlaw’s primary law content with Practical Law, a vast array of up-to-date legal resources, intuitively arranged to bring instantly to your fingertips what previously would have taken hours or days of research and writing. No matter where you are on the legal totem pole, from a solo practitioner to a junior associate to an experienced partner striking out with your own boutique, Practical Law Connect’s integration of Practical Law’s templates, forms, and model agreements gives you the power of a large practice without the costs that come with it.
“The most exciting thing about Practice Point, to my mind, is the fact that it allows in-house lawyers to work the way they need to work,” Susan Feingold, Head of the Law Department service for Practical Law (US), says. “You have the ability to browse, or to cut right to the chase and find curated content that hits the subject area you’re looking for.”
Newcomers to Practical Law Connect find a platform organized around different practice areas, with a series of task-based menus. This allows users to quickly drill down to the precise content they need with just a few clicks of a mouse, rather than hours of repetitive and often redundant searches yielding a similar but not perfectly suited document from four years ago, that then requires further hours of research and rewriting to bring up to date. Practical Law’s more than 200 experienced attorneys all work to do that for you, creating and maintaining thousands of state-of-the-art documents relevant to your day-to-day practice.
Looking for a buy-side agreement? Just click on “Corporate and M&A” to find “Draft and Negotiate Acquisition Agreements.” Direct links to up-to-date examples of the exact document you need are right there, along with all of the possible clauses and alternatives you might require to tailor that agreement precisely to your particular deal.
“In a matter of about five seconds, I can get to content that is relevant and valuable — very, very valuable,” one user says.
“Very often I’m looking for a particular type of agreement, or information on a particular concept or type of transaction,” another explains. “In this format, I can click through the menus to more carefully and more directly find the types of agreement I’m looking for.”
And what Practical Law Connect users find is not only what they’re looking for, but continuously edited and updated content monitored by lawyers with deep, relevant experience in the field, practicing with top law firms and corporate legal departments. “The content is excellent and current,” another user says. “We’re very, very confident that we’re getting the best and most accurate information we need.”
“The task-based menu is really based on a lot of the subject-matter expertise that lives with the Practical Law editors, and it was really meant to curate and bring together the vast quantity of information we have within the Thomson Reuters legal world — within Westlaw and Practical Law — and serve that up to our customers in a more easy-to-find way,” Chris Lafferty, Head of Product Management for Practical Law (US), explains. “If we at Thomson Reuters can make our customers’ practice better, we can make them practice more efficiently. They’re doing a better job for their customers, and they’re happier with us.”
A survey of Practical Law Connect users bears that out, with 80 percent reporting a notable improvement in overall efficiency after adopting the platform. Bill Kruse, senior counsel and regulatory compliance officer at Gallup, says he finds what he’s looking for on Practical Law Connect 90 percent of the time, obviating the need to spend more time looking — or cutting a check to outsource it to a law firm.
Put the power of Practical Law Connect’s team of 200 lawyers to work for you: Start a free trial, and see just how efficient you can be.