Contract Management

Contracts form the legal basis for protecting your business transactions. The fact that they are extensively used in most departments of your enterprise – whether for employment, purchase agreements, maintenance or collaboration with a business partner – makes it a business imperative to ensure contract completeness, validity, traceability and inalterability across the entire enterprise. This protects your commercial investments, enabling you to make good business decisions and mitigating the risk of litigation.

Organizations must manage contracts across their lifecycle: from creation through fulfillment and modification, to termination. Open Text solutions allow for this management by offering:

• Central standard repository, for rapid access to all contracts

• Easy integration into Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and desktop landscapes

• Assured adherence to compliance and corporate governance guidelines

• Access rights control

• Standard and customizable contract templates

• Solution Adaptations: Open Text Contract Management,

Email Monitoring

Your organization must capture and manage the lifecycle of – and streamline the discovery processes for – all regulated email communications. For example, the process of email journaling means that a financial services institution (where regulations demand all dealer-broker communications be available for immediate audit) can ensure regulatory compliance.

Email Monitoring (available for Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange editors) facilitates the capture and management of the lifecycle of all your email communications. The solution will:

• Support legal and litigation processes

• Ensure the security of journaled email

• Make compliance a transparent part of communications

• Extend into a complete compliance solution

• Solution Adaptations: Email Monitoring for Lotus Notes, Email Monitoring for Microsoft Exchange

Litigation Support

Litigation readiness is about understanding the risks, and what must be done ahead of time in order to avoid risks. An organization that has prepared for litigation will find it much easier to respond when it happens.

Activities such as Contract Management, Intellectual Property Management, Email Monitoring and Management, and Records Management are all necessary steps for litigation readiness.

As well, the ability to access content within the suitable context proves effective when preparing to litigate a matter. Open Text solutions help with this as they:

• Respond to discovery motions in a timely and decisive manner

• Protect relevant records through legal holds applied through a single, centralized interface

• Implement powerful processes for appropriate staff to review sets of responsive documents

• Support production of potentially thousands or millions of documents in electronic formats

• Solution Adaptations: Compliance & Governance, Open Text Email Management, Knowledge Management, Records Management

Patent Applications & Intellectual Property

Supporting patent applications requires demanding processes, especially in the U.S. where the first-to-invent system is used. This means that accurate and legally defensible records of the exact date of invention are required, which can be especially challenging in electronic systems. (In many other countries, the priority of invention is determined based on the date that an application is received by a patent office, known as first to file.)

Traditionally, signed and dated paper records and secure microfilm images were sufficient for the patent process. Now, electronic equivalents employing digital signatures or external electronic notarization are being developed. However, acceptance of those processes may take time, and will depend on emerging case law. As a result, organizations often print or microfilm key records and documents, and pass them to third parties for review and archiving.

ECM systems facilitate the tracking of both electronic and physical records, and the association between them. That means organizations don’t have risk defending their intellectual property by purely electronic means.

Solution Adaptations: Business Process Management, Document Management, Knowledge Management, Project Management

Records Management

Everyone in your organization must be empowered to file all corporate holdings according to the organizational policies, thereby ensuring regulatory compliance and reducing the risks associated with audits and litigation.

Livelink ECM – Records Management gives you comprehensive, complete lifecycle management of all corporate records and information holdings, in paper or electronic formats. It means your organization can:

• Meet U.S. Department of Defense standard 5015.2 regulations

• Minimize exposure to risk

• Improve productivity

• Ensure the integrity of corporate holdings

• Increase user adoption

• Reduce deployment costs

• Solution Adaptations: Records Management