Partners package legal management

A suite of commercial products designed to streamline document management and case materials is now at the disposal of general counsel offices at every level of government.

Global Management Systems Inc.'s Atvantec division and Hummingbird Ltd. announced Tuesday the release of Unimation, an information management system designed to help general counsel offices at the federal, state and local levels, as well as in the private sector.

The partnership will provide customers a gateway to all their legal department's information via a World Wide Web browser or desktop interface, said John McCarthy, senior sales consultant for Atvantec.

Atvantec, a provider of network and systems integration solutions, will package and deliver a suite of its own software along with Hummingbird's commercial off-the-shelf products. Hummingbird is an enterprise software solutions company.

"The beauty of this is that these same products are already being used in federal, state and local offices, but we're introducing an integrated [COTS] suite that offers a complete solution," McCarthy said.

Unimation, which costs from $250,000 to $500,000, is designed specifically for knowledge-intensive, paperless environments and has been implemented in the Defense Department and intelligence community, McCarthy said. The product also complies with DOD requirements for electronic records management applications, known as the 5015.2 standard.

The standard, which is mandatory for Defense agencies and endorsed by the National Archives and Records Administration, describes what ERM software capabilities must be to satisfy federal recordkeeping laws—including filing records according to their agency's file plan, capturing header information and attachments from e-mail and destroying records when they are no longer needed.

"This is a packaged, repeatable solution designed to meet the requirements unique to the [general counsel] office," McCarthy said.

Unimation's modular design contains databases that support case management, actions that are not case-related, investigations, ethics training, alternative dispute resolution and tracking Freedom of Information Act requests.