Business-to-Business E-Commerce Takes On New Meaning for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter; Employees to Access Financial Services Compliance Training Via Web

Business Wire, March 15, 2000

Business Editors

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 15, 2000

Company becomes latest to benefit from online legal training

LRN, The Legal Knowledge Company (http://www.lrn.com), announced today that Morgan Stanley Dean Witter (NYSE: MWD) will become a charter subscriber to its Legal Compliance and Education Center (LCEC).

The LCEC is the first entirely Web-based product that provides employees with knowledge in areas important to successful job performance, including antitrust, workplace harassment, securities, intellectual property, environmental and other laws.

Morgan Stanley Dean Witter joins 13 other Fortune 500 firms in the Charter Subscriber Program, including Allegiance, Conoco, Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg, Lucent, Sears, Texaco, Honeywell, Raytheon, Kennecott Energy, Boise Cascade, TRW and Unicom. Together the charter companies account for over 1,300,000 employees.

"This is just the beginning of how companies will use the Web to educate and train employees," remarked Dov Seidman, LRN's chairman and chief executive officer. "With the Web, we can offer realtime access to important legal information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."

Seidman added, "Because the LCEC is online and easy to use, it makes compliance training more flexible and efficient. Employees can start and stop when it's convenient and they can access the information from home or any PC with an Internet connection." LRN's program is also designed specifically for the Web. "We are not trying to make existing training manuals work in an online environment."

The LCEC represents a major step by LRN in its strategic effort to use Web-based knowledge services to help corporations create a legally aware workforce better able to recognize legal issues, manage legal risk, and capitalize on business opportunities.

"Fundamental to our Charter Subscriber Program is the ongoing and substantial involvement of these leading organizations in developing a common platform for content and content delivery via the Internet to educate employees worldwide," said Seidman. "Charter members are collaborating with LRN to create the industry standard for educating the workforce on legal compliance and ethics issues in a way that was not possible until the Web."

Morgan Stanley Dean Witter is a preeminent global financial services firm that maintains leading market positions in each of its businesses - securities, asset management and credit services.

MSDW will use the online compliance center to provide knowledge to employees in such industry-specific topics as supervision, suitability, money laundering, communication with the public, employee personal securities trading policy, political contributions, and gifts and entertainment as well as in many of the other topics currently offered by LRN.

LRN, The Legal Knowledge Company, is the country's leading provider of expert legal knowledge, including sophisticated legal research and analysis for lawyers, databases of legal memoranda and other materials for corporate law departments and law firms, Web-based compliance and education for corporate employees, and "proactive law" services.

LRN is headquartered in Los Angeles, Calif. For more information about LRN, visit the company's Web site at http://www.lrn.com.