A CEO has business meetings in London and Hong Kong, and in the mean time his company is acquiring a manufacturing center in South America. He is working with bankers in New York and Brazil to close the deal. In the interim the deal documents need to be reviewed and exchanged between all parties securely across borders, time zones, and teams. Luckily for the CEO he has an iPad®, so he can access and review documents throughout the deal regardless of whether he is in a taxi, on a train, or in his hotel room between meetings to ensure that the deal runs smoothly. 

In my role as Product Marketing VP of the Global Legal Segment for IntraLinks, I just completed an international speaking tour to engage General Counsel around the world about their most pressing needs. The goal was to have a conversation about how IntraLinks for Corporate Legal Management can provide solutions for those needs.

It truly was a global tour over the past month. I participated on a panel on technology solutions at the ACC Europe annual conference in Berlin, where I had the opportunity to share perspectives with in-house counsel from across Europe over the course of three days. IntraLinks led a panel at the ALM Corporate Counsel event in New York City, where I served as moderator and heard the viewpoints from General Counsel in the United States. And IntraLinks hosted a dinner event at the Savoy Hotel in London for a thought leadership discussion on risk readiness with senior corporate counsel based in the United Kingdom.

The term “collaboration” is rapidly becoming a misunderstood corporate buzz word as it applies to an ever-growing set of use cases. Collaboration is internally focused; it involves external parties. It’s ad hoc; it’s structured. When industry pundits discuss collaboration solutions, what should you pay attention to?

As the economy begins to recover, European mergers and acquisitions (M&A) enjoy a busy start to the year, fueling forecasts of a bounce back in deal volume terms. To find out what the leading M&A professionals expect to be the predominant deal making trends of 2011, I attended the first IntraLinks and mergermarket breakfast event in the new series entitled ‘Securing Growth in 2011: The Changing Face of M&A’.

Held at London’s Andaz Hotel, in the heart of the City, it attracted over 80 attendees, who were keen to learn more about the M&A trends for 2011. The discussion was chaired by Catherine Ford, Managing Editor - Remark, The Mergermarket Group and the panel consisted of Martin Ashcroft, Managing Director, Brunner Mond Group; James Stewart, Partner, ECI Partners LLP; Stephen Wilkinson, Partner, Corporate, Herbert Smith LLP and Philip Whitchelo, VP Product Marketing - M&A, IntraLinks.

November closed with London’s first snow of the season and IntraLinks’ inaugural Client Symposium for Alternative Investments. The former slowed people down while the latter accelerated ideas on increasing investor satisfaction and reinvestment.

Clients from the Nordic and Alpine countries of Sweden and Switzerland made the trek to London to join their peers at the Symposium. In fact, four of Europe’s six largest private equity firms participated in the event. Not to be outdone, IntraLinks chief marketing officer Greg Kenepp and IntraLinks senior vice president of product management Wade Callison crossed the Atlantic to join the discussion.