LitWorks » Risk Assessment

Advising your case teams on production formats

esantiago — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:38:01 +0000

When it comes to working with your case teams to meet document production deadlines, it helps to take a proactive approach. First, production formats are often unique to each firm based the litigation technology they have available. If you are a Concordance shop, then you don’t really want your attorneys to agree to delivering and/or receiving data as a Summation “briefcase.”A “best practice” for your firm may not be the desired production format for your opposing counsel. Litigation Support Professionals on staff should be engaged to determine what is the best production format or easiest-to-work-with-format for your firm whether you are the producing party or the receiving party. Then you should prepare your attorneys to be able to negotiate in your firm’s (and the client’s) best interests at the discovery conference.

Being proactive can be as simple as a production strategy meeting with your case team as early in the lifecycle of the matter as possible or taking the “edu-marketing” approach where you and your litigation support team address document production best practices for your firm at a lunch n learn training session for your paralegals & attorneys.

Proactive Preparation:

Define your firm’s production format best practices based on the technology you have available. Draft a “cheat sheet” for your attorneys to take with them to discovery conferences.

EDRM and elawexchange.com both provide direction and definitions:

Resources for consulting with your case teams regarding document productions:

Ralph Losey video: “Paper or Plastic” – a fun discussion of production formats
An example of what NOT to do can be found here

We discuss document productions, the best formats and production technology management in our LitWorks CLSP and CLSPM classes.

Case Law Summaries or When Things Don’t Quite Workout the Way You Planned

esantiago — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 14:33:38 +0000

As Litigation Support Professionals, sometimes it helps to have a story about what happens when e-discovery best practices are not followed. It helps us to understand the end result of the work we are typically involved in earlier in the lifecycle of a matter. The ESI processing (or conversion) that we are managing today will become next week’s document review database and later a production deliverable. The decisions about the form of production are often made by the attorneys well before we get involved in the matter and it has been my experience that many of the discovery disputes or mishaps could have been avoided had a Litigation Support Professional been engaged earlier in the litigation matter. But that’s a discussion for another post on another day… Earlier this week, someone asked me for a list of cases or case examples that present teachable moments regarding sanctions, preservation & collection, document productions, etc. I thought it would be useful to list a few of the websites that offer a neutral summary of recent cases as examples of what not to do in e-discovery. (I wish someone would start a site that shares case examples of when things go well…..)

E-Lessons Learned
K&L Gates – Electronic Discovery Law
Arkfeld’s E-Law Exchange
e-Discovery Team
Quarles & Brady’s E-Discovery Bytes
Post Process Blog EDD Bibliography

There are many other sites that provide case law summaries, these are just a few.

Estimating & Managing Risk in E-Discovery Projects

esantiago — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:00:37 +0000

Making the decision to settle a litigation matter is often not about “if” but “when.” Early Case Assessment (ECA) technology allows case teams to work together to determine the risk and strategic plan for reviewing electronically stored information (ESI) relevant to the litigation matter. As a litigation support project manager, how do you explain the value of ECA to your case team?

According to a recent article by Oliver Silva,

“ECA allows litigation support professionals, paralegals, and attorneys to gain greater insight into their document collections by interacting with the data prior to review. By implementing an e-discovery strategy utilizing ECA,case teams no longer need to use their best guess for relevant search terms. They become active participants in the search and culling process, which can be extremely advantageous when formulating effective search terms. Add to that arsenal the ability to apply advanced filters such as searching for “SPAM”, categorically excluding emails from an HR distribution list or seeing statistics of a document’s relevancy percentage — all completed within minutes. Thousands of false hits or irrelevant documents can be discarded from the review in a few mouse clicks. “

Litigation Support Project Managers can add ECA to their tool kit of options for their case teams. Silva outlines the value proposition for considering ECA in his article but here are a couple of the key points:

Formulating Search Terms vs. Negotiated Search Terms
Documented and Defensible Search Methodology

Does your standard e-discovery project management workflow include early case assessment technology? What are some of the key concepts in explaining the value of this option that you normally share with your case teams?