Join Mitratech President and CEO Afshin Behnia for the opening keynote of Interact 2008. The session will review the state of the legal and compliance industries and present new trends and technologies.

The founder of Legal OnRamp will describe how elite law departments and law firms are using very modern techniques from places like Facebook and Wikipedia to enhance the traditional collaboration, networking and value delivery of lawyers.

Designing, implementing, and improving governance, risk, management, compliance, ethics, and internal control systems is a time and resource-intensive proposition. This session offers guidance to help you demonstrate to the board that your company’s GRC initiatives are delivering outcomes that really matter to the business with insights into effective, standardized frameworks, performance metrics, and best practices from diverse organizations that are optimizing the performance of their GRC programs. Learn how to assess whether or not the money your company initially allocated for a compliance mandate or adverse audit has been and continues to be well spent. Gain insight into how to achieve different GRC performance management objectives, from taking a periodic pulse, to assessing whether your GRC program offers sustained value over time.

Many organizations implement technological solutions to satisfy a particular problem which often results in high costs and a number of disparate systems. This Visionary Award winner shifted to a process-oriented technology strategy to implement best practices for legal and compliance in a single, integrated solution. The innovative system enables the organization to collaborate with outside counsel, connect employees to legal and compliance functions, manage regulatory reports, improve decision-making with compliance dashboards, forecast litigation cases, manage alerts and risk assessments. Past winners include:

General Motors – Legal Operating System
The Home Depot – Outside Counsel Collaboration
JER – Integrated Litigation Management
Pfizer – Counterfeiting & Security Management
Textron – Cross-Enterprise Legal Unification
Genworth Financial - Overcoming M&A Challenges to Establish a Unified Legal and Compliance Strategy
Aon - Building A Global Legal Department

Last year, $9 billion oilfield services firm Baker Hughes agreed to pay a record $44.1 million to settle a probe into alleged bribery overseas. Baker Hughes Chief Compliance Officer Jay Martin shares his lessons learned about investigations, self-reporting, self-disclosure with expert commentary from James Doty, Partner at Baker Botts and former SEC GC, and Michael J. Sullivan, United States Attorney.

Many organizations have responded to increasing regulatory and federal mandates by instituting a dedicated compliance function. Moving forward, progressive departments are refining their compliance strategies to drive ethical, legal, and agile operations while supporting business growth. This session reviews the impact of recent legal and business developments on compliance strategy and discusses how to avoid common pitfalls that make a compliance program ineffective and difficult to maintain.

Privacy laws, language barriers, and cultural considerations are just a few challenges that complicate litigation when global organizations cross borders. This session discusses how to overcome these complexities through standardization, with best practices to develop effective processes for e-discovery.

An effective outside counsel management strategy involves a number of programs to ensure consistently retaining the right firm, reducing legal expenses, and receiving the value contracted. From bill review tools and methodologies to ebilling, scorecards, and benchmarking session panelists discuss best practices and share lessons learned.

You know the risks that arise when the duty to preserve kicks in. But managing an effective legal hold process is not easy. Join us for an interactive session on how to get in front of discovery challenges including setting up and managing a solid litigation hold strategy. We will explore the options available to the company anticipating litigation. What are the processes? What are the tools? Make sure you know when – and how – to hold ‘em!

By creating virtual teams that allow in-house and outside counsel to collaborate on legal work, organizations are able to elevate the level of service they receive, optimize efficiency, and drive down costs. Senior Manager for Legal IT Libby Troughton discusses how The Home Depot has been able to improve legal operations by teaming up with outside counsel. In addition, Michelle Mattei, Senior Legal IT Manager for Eisai and Mark Zirulnik, Managing Attorney for Selective Insurance discuss visions and strategies.

Here's an unfortunate but familiar scenario: a busy corporate legal department implements a new matter management system. The system works, the data is pristine, and the legal team gains valuable insight. But fast-forward a few years and things may have changed. System rules don't match current business practices; the data is incomplete or, worse yet, corrupted and the 3-5 year itch starts. Learn how to cure it with a design tune-up.

Description coming soon.

A growing number of legal departments are implementing Collaborative Spend Management (CSM) for a clear look at their bottom line. In this discussion, representatives from corporate legal and IT departments will discuss how they have been able to improve outside counsel relations and better manage legal costs. Panelists range from first time e-billing users to established users that moved to CSM and went live with over 90 firms on Day One.

New business challenges arise year after year and, with them, the need for new technologies. But lengthy RFP processes and costly implementations can adversely affect operations and bring on new risks. This session explores how some organizations are bypassing these concerns by taking inventory of their legal technology and leveraging existing systems to respond to new business challenges.

From wikis to blogs to social media, this roundtable discussion explores how Web 2.0 collaborative technologies will affect the legal department.

How does your organization rate on the Maturity Model for effectively managing the lifecycle of contracts? Come learn some best practices for designing and implementing a robust Contract Management system. Learn what other organizations are doing in this arena and learn how you may be able to leverage existing tools for some quick wins.

This session gathers together lessons learned from champions of technology to ensure project success by effectively managing the people side of change.

As organizations expand and the technology that supports them proliferates, the amount of personal information collected, used, stored, transferred, and disposed also increases. This session provides detailed recommendations to help you avoid personal data breaches and privacy infractions.

The legal industry is still relatively technology averse and many attorneys pass their matter management systems off to their paralegals and assistants. As a result, legal departments often miss out on the strategic value of their technology investment and use it solely for tactical purposes. This session explores different approaches to obtaining attorney buy-in and leveraging the full potential of your system.