As market power shifts from law firms to in-house counsel, Bloomberg Law has responded by bulking up the Corporate Practice Center with resources designed to address the special needs of Chief Legal Officers, Chief Compliance Officers and Chief Operating Officers.  Earlier this year Bloomberg Law relaunched the Corporate Practice Center with materials developed with extensive input from corporate counsel at major U.S. Companies. The Corporate Practice at Center  includes  practice pages covering: compliance, legal operations, corporate governance,  alternative business structures, litigation and corporate news. In addition an “In Focus, “hot topics” section offers deep coverage of special topics such as proxy regulation and FCPA.

Bloomberg and the Association for Corporate Counsel (ACC) also announced that they had entered a  strategic collaboration for Bloomberg Law to offer sponsored content, practice tools and editorial expertise to ACC members through professional enrichment, educational and development programs.

 
Bloomberg Law Corporate Practice Center

The Corporate Compliance Practice Page provides practical guidance. Section focuses on Risk Assessment & Benchmarking, Codes of Conduct, The Role of Management, Chief Compliance Officer & Board, and Due Diligence. The main focus of this practice page is ethics and compliance. The Bloomberg Law press release reports that according to the Association of Corporate Counsel Chief Legal Officers 2017 Survey, 74% of respondents rated at ethics and compliance as the top challenge. In response to this that Corporate Practice Center features a multitude of practical guidance materials including overviews, checklists, annotated forms, model documents and comparison surveys developed by attorneys at major U.S. corporations. It incorporates compliance content developed by the in-house legal department at U.S. Steel Corporation which provides users with step by step guidance for maintaining a corporate compliance program. The corporate practice center also includes sample form agreements and policies for routine tasks facing in-house attorneys.

 

 
Bloomberg Law Compliance Practice Page

The Legal Department Practice Page was designed for General Counsel, Chief Legal Officers and Chief Operating Officers. Content includes practical guidance on issues such as, department structure, budgeting, operations as well as specialized topics such as  whistle-blowing and privilege. Special features include a Foreign Corrupt Practices Tracker, company profiles, agency filings and primary source statutes. General Counsel Toolkit includes agreements and policies.

The General Counsel Toolkit include agreements & policies, practical guidance and legal analysis.

The Governance Practice Page provides a governance reference library, governance portfolios, state and federal laws and regs,  precedent documents for incorporation, bylaws, audit committees and other standard materials.

The Alternative Entities Practice Page covers, S Corporations, LLCs, Partnerships and Limited Partnerships. Content includes legal analysis, guidance, precedents, laws and regulations.

The Litigation Page offers a variety of trackers covering Delaware Chancery, US Supreme Court, SEC Enforcement, FCPA and Securities Enforcement. Other content includes dockets, agency material and legal analysis,

 

In Focus and Analytics a “hot topic” type offering provides deep insights into an important practice issue such as “Investor Activism” which provides analytics for “proxy season” highlighting the sectors being targeted. We have seen a lot of products offering litigation analytics, it is refreshing to finally see some slick corporate analtyics

 
Bloomberg Law Proxy Season Analytics

 

Although  The Corporate Practice Center was designed for in-house counsel, the content is available to all Bloomberg Law subscribers and will have obvious appeal to outside counsel in supporting the needs of their corporate clients.

The competition. Clearly these new enhancements are designed to enable Bloomberg Law to compete with Thomson Reuters Practical Law/Practice Point, and LexisNexis products Practice Adviser and Intelligize . Wolters Kluwer also recently entered this workflow enhancement space with a series of corporate workflow solutions branded as “smart tasks.” The past 5 years has seen a continuous expansion of workflow and artificial intelligence tools for lawyers. The value of current AI tools remains somewhat speculative, while workflow tools offer  more immediate benefits to both junior and more senior lawyers who are continually pressed to maximize efficiency. Ironically, BNA (before being purchased by Bloomberg) deserves the credit for creating the first practical guidance resources for corporate lawyers. The BNA Corporate Practice Portfolios beat TR’s Practical Law to the US market by about a decade. Bloomberg has taken that content to the next level by enhancing it with custom authored content from in house counsel, and integrating it with selected legal content from the Bloomberg Law platform. The one limitation I saw in the platform  was that it does not integrate with Word, requiring lawyers to cut and paste text. With all the models, precedents, checklists and templates in the platform, I just hope that Word integration is on the “short list” of upcoming enhancements.