SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 18, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ThinkSmart, a leader in Digital Transaction Management, today announced its Automation Platform (TAP) is being incorporated into a course for law students taught at LegalRnD – The Center for Legal Services Innovation at Michigan State University College of Law. Starting Fall 2016, students will receive hands-on experience using TAP to automate legal processes as part of the course, Litigation: {Data, Theory, Practice, & Process}. LegalRnD supports innovation and technology, like TAP, to drive efficient and effective best practice solutions for legal-service delivery.
LegalRnD concentrates on foundational disciplines, such as process improvement, project management, and data analytics, and technology to prepare its graduates to take on the latest challenges in the legal industry. Dan Linna, Director at LegalRnD and professor of law in residence at MSU Law, worked closely with his colleague, Amani Smathers, a legal solutions architect at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP (DWT) and MSU Law graduate, to develop the process automation project for the Litigation course. Smathers was already familiar with TAP through her role at DWT and her knowledge of its use by the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC). Integrating TAP into the curriculum reinforces LegalRnD’s focus on leveraging expert systems and document automation for legal processes. The Litigation course also explores proactive law—using improved processes and technology to prevent disputes and promote clients’ business interests.
In the course, students will be trained to use ThinkSmart’s Automation Platform and use it to automate a legal process. The students will partner with CLOC members in designing and implementing relevant workflows.
TAP offers an elegant digital solution enabling corporate legal departments to successfully automate any business process. ThinkSmart’s platform includes sets of predefined self-service workflows to get companies up and running in a fraction of the time it would normally take. Some examples include, but are not limited to, self-service NDAs, contract lifecycle automation, advanced approvals, matter management, and SOX reporting.
“We are thrilled to be working with the ThinkSmart team. LegalRnD’s mission is to improve legal-service delivery and access to legal-services for everyone,” said Linna. “Much can be accomplished by creating standards and best practices and using technology to automate time consuming, manual processes. In addition to legal doctrine, our LegalRnD students learn about process improvement, project management, metrics, and technology. Students leverage these disciplines to improve legal processes and can quickly scale these processes with TAP.”
“As an organization, CLOC’s mission is to help legal operations professionals and other core corporate legal industry players (e.g. tech providers, law firms, law schools, etc.) to drive efficient and effective solutions,” stated Connie Brenton of the CLOC leadership team. “LegalRnD is on the cutting edge in teaching future legal professionals how TAP is used to manage and automate legal processes. Learning these skills will help prepare LegalRnD students to improve legal-service delivery in corporate legal departments, law firms, and other legal-services organizations.”
"ThinkSmart is honored to be a part of the innovative LegalRnD program at Michigan State Law. Having TAP included in the LegalRnD curriculum reinforces the value of our platform in the legal space,” said Paul Hirner, CEO, ThinkSmart. “We have worked closely with legal operations professionals who have contributed to developing key features of TAP. We welcome the next generation of legal experts.”
The primary goal of the Litigation: {Data, Theory, Practice, & Process} class is for students to learn how to leverage data, theory, and process proactively to prevent disputes and to obtain better results in litigation. Students will explore sources of data and the use of decision theory, game theory, and economic analysis to evaluate claims, predict outcomes, and improve litigation strategies. The class begins on August 29, 2016.
About LegalRnD – Michigan State University College of Law
LegalRnD – The Center for Legal Services Innovation at Michigan State University College of Law is dedicated improving access to legal services across the legal industry, from legal aid and the consumer legal market to legal departments and law firms. LegalRnD is training 21st century “T-shaped” lawyers—lawyers with deep substantive legal knowledge accompanied by an understanding of the business of delivering legal services, process improvement, project management, metrics and data analytics, technology, and innovation and entrepreneurship. LegalRnD works with industry partners to develop, test, implement, and improve innovative methods to improve legal-service delivery. Visit www.LegalRnD.org for more information.
About CLOC
The “go-to” organization for information about legal operations and connections to the best legal operations professionals in the business. To help legal operations professionals and other core corporate legal industry players (e.g. tech providers, law firms, LPO’s, law schools, etc.) optimize the legal service delivery models needed to support the needs of small, medium and large legal departments. We do this by supporting Legal Operations and Chief of Staff professional development; offering best practices support in areas including legal department tools, technology, templates and knowledge bases; and working with key legal service providers to drive efficient & effective solutions for corporate legal customers. Visit www.cloc.org for more information.
About ThinkSmart
ThinkSmart LLC, a leader in Digital Transaction Management (DTM), provides an Automation Platform (TAP) to companies seeking to automate and digitize business processes. The TAP solution provides intuitive drag and drop tools enabling companies to very quickly design, build and implement any workflow. Integration with client internal systems, and top tier eSign companies makes TAP an attractive option for organizations interested in optimizing the business using cost effective automation tools. In 2016, ThinkSmart was named as an Aragon Research Hot Vendor in DTM.
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