Beyond Enhancing E-Billing, Budget Collaboration, Shadow Invoicing for Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFAs), and Accessibility Features Bring New Collaborative Accountability Support to Law Firm Management

LOS ANGELES, CA--(Marketwire - July 28, 2010) -  Mitratech, the leader in collaborative accountability applications including enterprise legal and compliance management automation, today announced the release of TeamConnect® Legal 3.2 with expanded e-Billing and spend management capabilities. The new release's collaborative budgeting tools dramatically speed the financial planning process. Its shadow invoices capture details on outside counsel work products purchased through Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFA) and provide the ability to measure AFA effectiveness as well as outside counsel performance.

TeamConnect Legal 3.2 meets the growing demand within corporate legal departments for integrated solutions that achieve greater process efficiency while managing, controlling and reducing legal costs. More than a quarter of the Fortune 500 legal departments and 98 percent of the AmLaw 100 already use TeamConnect Legal to automate core processes and collaborate within a secure environment that provides traceability and defensibility of all communications.

While TeamConnect Legal is a comprehensive platform, modules addressing key legal functions, such as e-Billing and spend management, are also available as standalone solutions. For the e-Billing module, Mitratech offers an online ROI calculator to help organizations understand the dramatic savings they can realize by migrating from paper-based billing to e-billing. The ROI Calculator can be found at: http://www.mitratech.com/pages/e-billing-roi-calculator

Budget Collaboration -- Improved Accuracy, Efficiency in Budget Development and Forecasting
Effective budgeting helps in-house and outside counsel focus on the needs of the business to develop a litigation strategy aligned with corporate objectives not only in terms of cost but also timing, steps, variables, and desired outcomes. New Budget Collaboration tools in TeamConnect Legal 3.2 improve communication, increase efficiency, and streamline the budgeting process, providing a workspace for in-house and outside counsel to collaborate during the budget planning process with an audit trail of activities. The tools also enable corporate counsel to measure outside counsel's budgeting accuracy and long-term performance against budgets.

Alternative Fee Arrangements -- Predictable Budgeting and a View into Performance
Increasingly, corporate legal departments are implementing Fixed Fee or Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFAs) in order to achieve predictability in the litigation budgeting process, something that has previously remained elusive. However, while in-house counsel have found some level of predictability with AFAs, they have been unable to effectively measure how those arrangements compared to what would have been billed. The Shadow Invoices feature in TeamConnect Legal 3.2 addresses this by providing in-house counsel visibility into the substance of the work performed by outside counsel and the associated value received. The in-house team can now measure performance against spend in order to evaluate the effectiveness of their alternative arrangements.

Enhanced Accessibility -- Maximum System Adoption across Internal Users and Extraprise Teams
Section 508 accessibility. To satisfy compliance regulations detailed in Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act requiring Federal agencies to provide disabled persons the same information access that is available to others, TeamConnect Legal 3.2 adheres to W3C Priority 1 guidelines through the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, or VPAT. Leveraging Job Access with Speech (JAWS) functionality, TeamConnect Legal 3.2 enables visually impaired users to access the e-billing application through screen reader software programs. As part of its accessibility roadmap for disabled users, Mitratech is committed to providing advanced features in product navigation with tabbing and keyboard shortcuts. 

Browser support. Expanded support makes TeamConnect Legal 3.2 the legal and compliance industry's most versatile system. Platform agnostic, TeamConnect Legal 3.2 runs on a variety of client-side browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome.

"The new outside counsel collaboration features in TeamConnect Legal 3.2 enable corporate legal departments to raise their spend management automation to the next level and achieve greater ROI through optimized Alternate Fee Arrangements, improved outside counsel services, and more accurate budgeting," said Afshin Behnia, President and CEO of Mitratech. "By optimizing legal operations, especially collaboration with outside counsel, our products not only enable in-house attorneys to focus on mission-critical activities that directly contribute to the business's competitive advantage, they also capture critical financial and performance information to help make successful outcomes repeatable."

About TeamConnect® Legal - TeamConnect® Legal allows corporate legal departments to control legal expenses through electronic invoicing and outside counsel collaboration tools. The system helps corporate counsel strategically manage legal costs, automatically enforce billing guidelines, and significantly improve operational efficiency. TeamConnect Legal e-Billing clients are able to achieve roughly 10 - 15 percent cost savings simply by eliminating duplicate invoices and duplicate charges across different invoices, and ensuring compliance with billing guidelines.

About Mitratech - Mitratech provides market-leading Collaborative Accountability Applications for businesses and their trusted partners. With team-oriented domain applications in legal process automation, governance, risk, compliance and security, Mitratech's TeamConnect® Collaborative Accountability Suite improves transparency of financial reporting, reduces exposure to risk, sharpens operating discipline, improves information security and the efficiency of enterprise processes. Our Collaborati browser application also meets the accountability and collaboration needs of proliferating extraprise teams, wherein vendors, partners and service providers often have to be included in sensitive teamwork projects such as electronic billing, legal hold and collaborative budgeting, or those which expose your business to liability. To learn more, visit http://www.mitratech.com.