From: John Conover <john@email.johncon.com>
Subject: Just a thought
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 1994 09:21:07 -0700 (PDT)
Hi Ray. Got to thinking about centralized legal services after our
phone conversation. I never signed anything at S-MOS without legal
advice, because of the complexities of contract law, but it usually
was an issue (the customer is in the conference room, and I need to
sign an NDA so we can negotiate the big deal, but Doug is in Japan,
Thor has the day off, etc.)
If the legal folks all have access to the email system, someone in the
field can scan a document (like an NDA, perhaps,) transfer it to the
legal department via email/MIME (which handles bitmaped documents,)
read by an attorney, and advice can be returned to the sender, ASAP.
Distribution in the legal department could be handled by a program
similar to GNATS, which is available from prep.ai.mit.edu in /pub/gnu
at no cost (the program is used for tracking software customer support
issues and bugs.) This program "listens" to a specific email address,
(where all things legal would be directed) and when something comes
in, opens a docket number, and distributes the email to someone to
address the issues involved. When that someone replies, the
transaction is recorded in a database, with a copy of the document,
and the docket closed, thus archiving the transaction (ie., the who,
when, where, what is all automatically logged.)
In principle, you could rotate assignment of the "legal duty officer
of the day" responsibilities, and, after hours, stuff could
automatically be relayed to a domestic machine for action, giving 24hr
service.
This is the way we ran things in ASIC engineering, and would be kind
of an "online legal operations."
Just a thought,
John
--
John Conover, john@email.johncon.com, http://www.johncon.com/