Today, Thomson Reuters launched Concourse for government legal departments. Concourse is suite of integrated tools and information designed expressly for government agencies and corporate counsel. Concourse is built around an dashboard, providing an integrated, collaborative platform for government legal departments. According to the company, Concourse is organized around matters, providing one place where documents, research, emails, media files and more can be easily accessed, searched and shared.
Thomson Reuters says that the solution is meant to streamline much of the legal work that goes on in government by creating a central clearinghouse of information and create workflows that reach across silos.
“Government legal departments frequently deal with a high volume of document-intensive matters that require organization as well as close collaboration with a variety of internal and external entities,” said Stephen Rubley, managing director of the Thomson Reuters Government segment. “We listened to hundreds of our government customers and then delivered Concourse in answer to their persistent need to connect the things that matter – people, documents, research, emails and more – in one location that is easy to access.”
Concourse is part of a broader set of product launches focused on large corporate counsel operations and government legal operations. The tools are all designed to integrate with existing business process management products like WestlawNext® or the Microsoft Office suite. Two new workflow modules – Matter Room and Legal Hold – are built natively within Concourse and represent the first in a family of new tools Thomson Reuters is building for government legal departments.
“In our conversations with government legal departments, a consistent theme was the difficulty in finding and leveraging previous work product – especially email that contained information and advice that would be relevant to the matter at hand,” Rubley explained.
Matter Room allows matter-centric document organization and access, and enables documents, people, email and legal information all to be searched at once using the same powerful search technology behind Westlaw. The second new module within Concourse, Legal Hold, is a repeatable, automated and defensible workflow tool that supports the litigation hold notification and tracking process. Users also will be able to access legislative alerts served up through Concourse via the Thomson Reuters Capitol Watch product. Users can also get access to Reuters news products within the dashboard.
Concourse operates on the cloud and can be accessed from multiple devices and is designed to promote information sharing and collaboration across departments. The tools were also built for the mobile experience, and uses a single sign-on for access to all of the applications and tools on the Concourse dashboard.
