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Litigation Support Software |
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IT for Disclosure?
Parent page(s): Home Introduction IT for Disclosure?
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Sharing data with the Team It is no longer only the city giants who can justify the investment in technology to handle the big document-heavy cases. Smaller firms are winning clients - and winning their actions - by equipping themselves to handle the big cases. And the cost of the equipment is falling. Litigation, like the law firms which handle it, comes in all sizes. Disclosure is done by sole practitioners working alone whose lists may comprise only a handful of documents, and by large teams working together for months in several locations and more than one country. Often, the sole use made of the List of Documents is to serve it pursuant to the Rules. At the other extreme, the store of data about a case may have to be mined assiduously for every scrap of information about a person, an event or a theme. Sometimes this involves months of detailed research; sometimes it has to be done on the fly - in court as the evidence emerges minute by minute. Often such cases have budgets which would fund a year's caseload for a smaller firm. In the middle ground between these extremes lies the more usual scenario - Firm A, with a few thousand documents, a partner, an assistant, a trainee and a secretary at the solicitor's office, a client with one or more people involved on a daily basis, a barrister and an expert. And, of course, an opponent, Firm B, similarly staffed but perhaps not so willing to apply technology to the administrative, legal and tactical roles which must be played. Disclosure has just taken place, and an Interlocutory Hearing looms. All the documents in Firm A's list have been coded by relevance to particular issues, by reference to their original file and present location. Further work is going on to refine the data by identifying all the documents which bear on the issues to be raised at the interlocutory hearing, so the data is updated daily. The client's input is needed into this, and each day he is e-mailed the latest version of his solicitor's master database to update his own local copy. He can continue to review what is being done and to add to his private comments (which are unchanged by the daily updates) - whilst looking at the images he has loaded from CD at his office. It is only the changing master data which he needs to receive by e-mail. The expert also has a set of images in his own office. His task is independent of the daily updates which are being made, so he can work with a copy of the data to make his comments. A periodic update is made by e-mail to add batches of his comments into the main data store and to replace his working copy with a fresh one. The barrister is working on this case from Chambers in the week and from the Home Counties at week-ends. He no longer has to carry a boot load of ring binders, because he too has a CD of the images and his own copy of the main data store, and can at any time load in the latest e-mail update. His main task is searching the coding and the text of the documents to find support for the arguments he is putting together. All the changes are reflected instantly at all the workstations within the firm and to any outside team members who need to dial in. The partner is able to check on changes made each day by searching for items which are flagged as having been updated. There is, of course, a cost attached to all this. There has been an investment in PCs, in big monitors so that the images can be read easily, e-mail links and, of course, in getting the data in and having the images scanned. The partner is smiling, however. For one thing, he knows that he and his team are on top of the material and in a position to run rings round Firm B to an extent which might, just, outweigh the weaknesses in his client's case. For another, the cost of gradually providing more equipment for the rest of his department continues to fall relative to the original investment, for similar power, relative to the labour costs of doing the same task in the old ways, and relative to the speed and cost-effectiveness now expected of litigation firms. Lastly, he has just won a new client, against stiff opposition from larger firms, mainly by showing off the equipment and the co-ordinated teamwork which it allows. Chris Dale Chris has been working on litigation support software for over 10 years. The software is marketed under the name Openlaw. Openlaw is low cost litigation support software, priced by the matter, designed to help litigators meet their post-Woolf obligations in the most cost-effective manner. |
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