Patent ID: 7653631

Claim:
A method, comprising: providing at least first and second legal case management systems, each legal system including a data storage component for storing status data about legal matters, a messaging component for sending messages between users of the system, a posting component for posting data items; organizing the status data, messages and postings by activity within one of said legal matters, handled by a user of the system; using data stored in one or both of the legal case management systems, with the legal matters in each of the legal case management systems; sending a message from the first legal case management system to the second legal case management system, the message including an indication of the legal matter and any activity to which the message relates; receiving the message at the second legal case management system, the second legal case management system directing the message to the associated matter in the second legal case management system; a user of the second legal case management system receiving the message and associating it with a corresponding one of the activities in the legal matter in order to synchronize messages for the first and second legal case management systems; presenting the synchronized messages to users of the first and second legal case management systems; and using data stored in one or both of the case management systems, associating the user IDs that belong to the same person as between each of the case management systems, thereby allowing users to be correlated between systems; wherein any further messages received from the first legal case management activity are automatically associated with the corresponding activity in the second legal case management system.