Digital White Papers

36 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER LITIGATION AND PRACTICE SUPPORT Litigation Support in a Municipal Law Department We more or less backed into the project when two of our litigators began working on a large (for us) maer with potential exposure in the range of $30 million. The documentary record went back five decades. Counsel for other parties in the maer were using tools like Summation and CaseMap, and our team wanted something similar for case analytics and trial preparation to even the playing field. Given the amount in play, we had a lile more budget leeway than usual. We selected and purchased a bundle of products from Thomson Reuters, the main components of which are Case Notebook and Case Logistix. They best fit our evaluation criteria. Then another document- heavy case came in, and then another. We soon realized the soware would be generally useful and rolled it out to our entire litigation group. Learning To Work with the Corporation Convincing the centralized IT of our organization to purchase, install and support the soware was a journey of its own and has resulted in a much richer and more effective relationship between the two departments. Legacy systems used by the legal services department were incompatible with corporate standards, and our application mix was a house of cards: touch one application, and they all fall down. IT's increased involvement with us opened their eyes to the perilous state of the department's technology. The litigation support initiative became the springboard for a major upli sponsored by our corporate projects group and executed by an expert cross-functional team over the past two years. Where Are We Now? The soware is in and operational on servers and desktops, and we are teaching our team how to use the soware well and how to work within its litigation support paradigm. The rest of the organization is learning how to be effective in providing disclosure documents to us. IT provides and supports the infrastructure; handles maintenance, packaging, installations and upgrades; and interfaces/ troubleshoots with the vendor. I work on techy-legal tasks and components of the system and on high-level design. I also train and support our lawyers. The department's paralegal is responsible for the operational side: opening maers, geing documents in, defining fields, managing productions and so on. There is also some design work, with more to come as skills broaden. The paralegal also creates documentation and provides training and organization for a legal assistants user support group. Where Are We Going? Our long-term objective is to use the system for document management and case analytics in all litigation defense maers. We have the technology in place, but changing people and processes is a continuing endeavor. Fortunately, our leadership group is fully supportive. For example, use of the technology is now a performance review topic. We have a fairly concrete picture of our target environment and understand that knowledge acquisition and transfer are fundamental. Our model does not include a separate litigation support group but rather integrates litigation support within our litigation practice. Legacy systems used by the legal services department were incompatible with corporate standards, and our application mix was a house of cards.

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