Digital White Papers

37 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER LITIGATION AND PRACTICE SUPPORT Litigation Support in a Municipal Law Department We expect to transition several tasks from the paralegal to the legal assistants, including geing documents in and running productions. Knowledge transfer from the paralegal to the legal assistants will be important. We will streamline the process for legal assistants by replacing largely manual processes with electronic ones (although convincing them of that is another thing). Shiing work from the paralegal opens up her time to acquire more expertise. And then more knowledge transfer and continuous process improvement. I am also transferring knowledge to the lawyers. Workload and inertia mean striking when the opportunity presents itself. A succession planning issue looms as I plan to move into retirement over the next year or so. Knowledge transfer from me to the paralegal (and, to a lesser degree, to IT) has become a priority. Challenges, Solutions and Serendipity Ours is a good news story. Out of the multitude of challenges we encountered, the top three were: » Implementing the soware » Creating a healthy relationship between the legal services and IT departments » Changing behavior in legal services staff The common thread to the solutions to these challenges has been to keep our eyes fixed firmly on the horizon. Taking in the long view gives everyone permission to overlook shortcomings and setbacks and create a long-term vision and strategic plan. Returning to the vision and plan regularly reinforces the big picture, reassures where efforts are advancing and grounds a reset where efforts are not. Implementing the Soware: Going from the Stone Age to a SQL server has not been easy, and leveraging the expertise of corporate IT has been vital. We use Visio maps to track progress of our litigation "as is" and "to be" states, supplemented by a dashboard; these graphic representations of the proportion of cases in the new system and the number of pages under management is helpful. This feeds into our benefits realization plan. Seing expectations and measuring progress as we go builds confidence that we will eventually reach our destination. 1 Returning to the vision and plan regularly reinforces the big picture, reassures where efforts are advancing and grounds a reset where efforts are not. Open Questions for the Department Many intriguing questions still need answers, including: Will there be a case where we cannot handle litigation support internally because of size and resources? On the few occasions when we use outside counsel, might we require them to use us for litigation support? Will we ask outside counsel to use the same case analytics software? We'll see what the future holds.

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