Corporations have used automation for years to improve processes and efficiency in many areas of their internal operations and their supply chains. Corporate law departments — under increasing pressure to do more with less — are now expressing increasing interest in using automation to deliver online legal services to their internal corporate clients and customers.

Online legal services, also known as "Virtual Lawyers", can provide situation-specific guidance to thousands of corporate employees. In a wireless world, this guidance can be made available to any authorized employee anytime, anywhere. The guidance provided by online legal services can be as customized and as sophisticated as the guidance provided by live attorneys. Online legal services can ask clients for relevant facts, collect additional data from company databases, and render guidance to clients wherever and whenever needed, in minutes, in a convenient and consistent way. Online legal services can produce customized reports, forms, and documents for clients, and can generate detailed explanations and audit trails if desired. Also, online legal services can and usually are improved over time, in an evolutionary fashion, so that the guidance provided by online legal services gets better the more such systems are used.

The Jnana software platform is optimized for the creation of online legal services. Over the past few years, major law firms and corporate law departments have used the Jnana software platform to build and deploy a variety of online legal services. For example, an AmLaw 50 law firm used Jnana to build a system for banking clients that identifies legal risk to collateral in cross-border transactions. The law department of a Fortune 50 company used Jnana to build a Virtual Patent Advisor that identifies patent infringement risks. The tax department of another Fortune 50 company used Jnana to build systems that provide guidance on various tax-related matters.

As corporate law departments and their law firms increasingly look to create online legal services that automate routine and recurring legal and regulatory guidance, Jnana expects to see a substantial increase in the use of the Jnana software platform to create Virtual Lawyers for Fortune 500 companies.