So, you find yourself managing a lawsuit or lawsuits on a mass scale. The deadlines are coming fast and furious, numerous data points are becoming unmanageable, your fear of missing a deadline is at an all-time high, and the overall management, strategy, and planning requirements are daunting.
Managing your cases throughout all phases of litigation, however, doesn’t need to be an all-consuming or frightening series of events. With planning, a little foresight, and establishing your core litigation team using a two-pronged approach, you can navigate the case life cycle from its onset to its final resolution with confidence, knowing that you’re utilizing the best processes, the best tools, and the best people for the job.
The Legal Team
Let’s start with the legal team. The members of the legal team are the true experts and heroes in this story. They know the cases, the jurisdictions, the rules of litigation, the facts of the case, and are the source for all the best strategies. The legal team knows the key data points that must be tracked and the deadlines that must be met. They are also in-tune with the pieces of data, or lack thereof, that result in deficiencies from either party, as well as the reporting needs for their clients.
They are the masters at recognizing the necessary exhibits for exchanges and use at trial, identifying witnesses, drafting deposition outlines, preparing and responding to motions, planning for filings, outlining review guidelines, determining relevance, preparing for discovery deadlines and exchanges, etc. The list can go on and on! Litigating a case successfully relies on the legal team implementing the most effective strategy to harness their knowledge.
The Technical Solutions / Project Management Team
Next, let’s discuss the technical solutions team. The technical solutions team is responsible for providing a method for the legal team to track and manage all the necessary data points and help put their strategy for litigating the cases into action. This team is typically a technical solutions provider or vendor for the law firm, or it can be an in-house technical team. The front lines are comprised of project managers, also known as PMs, as well as a host of other support players: database analysts, systems operations, data and document processers, security team, compliance team, developers, etc.
The technical solutions team is responsible for storing and hosting all the data points and documents needed to support the legal team. They provide the necessary tools and processes to easily navigate through vast amounts of data to glean the required information, metrics, and reporting necessary for the legal team to make sound judgements related to their strategy.
They also help identify which processes can be automated, convert the data points into visual metrics or reports, communicate with the legal team, handle logistics, and ensure the solutions implemented align with the legal team’s desired goals and strategies for the cases they are litigating.
Better Together
The legal and technical solutions teams, when working together, become the ultimate power couple. It is a cohesive partnership that makes up the ideal two-pronged approach when establishing your litigation management project team and system.
The legal team’s primary focus is to litigate their cases successfully, save their client money while performing the best job possible, and of course, to WIN! The technical solutions team’s primary focus is to help implement a solution that ensures data integrity, enhances security, drives efficiency and automation, cuts costs, and most importantly, harnesses the legal team’s knowledge and strategy into an easy-to-use system that supplies metrics and reports at their fingertips … and of course, to help the legal team WIN! Both are equally necessary, and both are better together.
What You Need for Success
So, we have our power couple. But what does every power couple need for ultimate success, you ask? A solid foundation – meaning, a litigation management system and approach that checks the following boxes:
- A suite of tools that covers the legal team’s needs for processing, hosting, intuitive searching and reporting, review, productions, and automation.
- Seamless workflow integration.
- Automated ingestion of documents filings.
- De-duplication and near-duplication to ensure cost savings and reduce the document footprint.
- Use of Gen AI tools where data extraction, coding, document review, and case summaries can be automated as much as possible, allowing the legal team to focus on strategy.
- Deadline tracking and alert notifications for key dates.
- A supportive and interactive project management team that partners with the legal team to provide configurable options that address project needs to maintain an integrated approach throughout the life cycle of the case. (An out-of-the-box system with limited configurable items may be too limited and debilitating for a legal team.)
- A highly flexible and configurable approach with continuous process improvement regarding all aspects of the project.
Establishing a powerhouse legal team with an innovative technical solutions provider, all backed by a strong litigation management system, will drive efficiency and result in successfully managing litigation needs. Each part has an incredible skill set on its own, but together, they are unstoppable when it comes to ingenuity and creativity. This allows them to effectively build the best processes, utilize the best tools, and harness the knowledge from their best people.
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Nancy has a knack for color-coding and organization. Give her a rainbow collection of sticky-notes, highlighters, and space to outline a plan and she’s in paradise. So, it’s not surprising that she has an incessant need and talent of taking large amounts of data, information and client requirements and organizing them into a Litigation Management workflow with built-in processes. Learn more about Nancy.
