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Technical Standards
Includes: - Load Files - Cost Codes - Quotes - For Vendors - For Firms  |
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Read about litigation tech strategies and best practices for the case and firm.
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Litigation Support Department Includes:
- Budget Spreadsheet - Needs Assesment - Case Technology Plan - Task and Check Lists - Member's Area Access  |
Table of Content - Complete Book
Clients
Preface
About Mark Lieb
To Litigation Support Professionals
To Attorneys and Paralegals
I Heirarchy II Services
III Needs Assessment
IV Tools
V Litigation Case Lifecycle
VI Supporting Files
Buy the Book
Every law firm has its own personality and culture, often with people who have been there for ten, twenty or more years. In this sort of environment, instituting a new system can be difficult, if not impossible. However, the current state of Litigation Support in most law firms could do with a complete overhaul in order to deal with the various documentation needs demanded by the average case. Attorneys do not have the time or interest in distinguishing between single page .TIFs versus multi-page .TIFs: they simply want to start looking at those images. Who can take ownership of this type of technical consideration, thereby leaving attorneys and paralegals to the law? That is the purpose of this book.
The system described here offers a set of tools to assist law firms in setting up a Litigation Support Department, dedicated to provide clear procedures that will bring order to the currently chaotic world of Litigation Support. Ultimately, the procedures and methods described in this book give the vendor and support staff a common frame of reference. Litigation Support gains the trust of the legal team and gains technical project management responsibility for all forms of discovery.
The real issues in Litigation Support work are work flow and delegating authority. Litigation Support manages all the discovery projects, database administration and data analysis work; often, this work is done in an ad-hoc manner, and has no real defined procedures or methodology. That type of “system” is management by abdication, not delegation.
Whether there are ten litigators or a thousand, a law firm must implement a unified strategy to Litigation Support or drown in the very data its clients generate. It used to be that one lawyer could literally swamp another in paper and thereby push for a settlement. Today, the recipient of one banker box of electronic discovery can spend years looking through documents and categorizing them -- assuming that the client can afford to turn that discovery into a reviewable database.
This book explicitly outlines how to organize everything for cases, departments, and the firm. It also covers strategy such as knowing what and when to outsource work. Cost recovery is a major issue for every firm. Services such as computer forensics and database creation may run into serious money for an individual case. Should the firm bring certain services "in-house"? All firms, regardless of size, must address many considerations having to do with mitigating risk, cost recovery and creation of a litigation technology plan.
This book attempts to outline how to run the department as a business. It shows how to organize the data and people so that your department can accommodate a growing volume or work. The book also includes operating procedures for supporting a case, from pleading to trial all from a litigation technology perspective.
This book is intended to provide a firm with the knowledge necessary to implement its own Litigation Support Department, run as a business, and thus able to save and indeed make money for the law firm that it supports.