November/December 2009 / Features
Three Litigation Management Strategies
Preparing documents for litigation is the fastest growing legal expense in corporate America, and about one-half of what is being spent is wasteful, according to the authors. A recent survey found serious concern that the cost of discovery as opposed to the merit of cases is forcing settlements. This article presents three strategies to reduce those costs: process management, quality control and collaborative systems.
An analysis of the legal industry’s standard process found that documents were reviewed, tagged, read and logged on average fourteen times each as they were prepared for litigation. Creating a new, structured process is one way to eliminate redundancy. Once a process is in place, it becomes possible to measure the quality, time and cost of each activity, analyze which activities are most valuable, and modify or eliminate those that are wasteful. Quality control using judgmental and statistical sampling makes it possible to produce a work product that is more than 99 percent accurate while reducing the cost of the industry-standard process by more than 20 percent.
More than 20 percent of the work done in the industry-standard process is wasteful because excessive time is spent searching or waiting for information. Collaborative systems using Web 2.0 tools cut those costs by facilitating creation and delivery of knowledge in real time.
