Spriggs & Hollingsworth is a leader among law firms in applying technology to the management of complex litigation. Our efforts in this regard have proven cost effective and have added value to the quality and effectiveness of our representation of our clients. Our technology solutions focus on the following areas:
Practice Management
We have implemented technology to facilitate our management of complex litigation, such as mass or serial litigation and large dollar, multiparty cases. For mass or serial tort litigation, for example, we have developed a system for practice management that allows us, at a glance, to do the following (among many other things):
- View all aspects of a particular case and compare cases in mass or serial tort litigation, including multi-district litigation
- Review all of the critical issues within a particular case or across the MDL,
- Contact and update the important players and teams,
- Review, schedule, and disseminate information immediately to all related cases,
- Maintain case-related information about individual exposure claims, medical histories, and experts,
- Track experts, their depositions and reports, and specialty, and
- Take advantage of our personal and group calendaring system to coordinate scheduling and staffing depositions in multiple jurisdictions at multiple times.
The firm has spent nearly two years evaluating, developing and customizing the practice management software solution. Our practice management system is an object-oriented platform that permits us to store, retrieve, and analyze extensive information about our cases; we also use it as a portal to launch our other discovery-management and document-management applications related to a particular matter. Practice management provides us an integrated platform for the firm to continue its movement toward a (more) paperless environment.
We have a Database Applications Specialist on staff to work on customizing the practice management system and to generate reports. Our practice management vendor rewrote several parts of the computer code to meet needs we identified, and we've reengineered our workflow to take advantage of the efficiency the practice management platform enables.
In complex litigation matters, we may also provide co-counsel and our clients with direct network access to the practice management system that we develop (as well as other technology systems discussed below), to avoid duplication, facilitate coordination, and reduce the inevitable frictional costs from having more than one law firm involved with substantive responsibility. In other instances, where we are in a national-counsel relationship with various co-counsels, we may use our practice management and litigation support systems to delegate tasks while still assuring quality control and standardization. We have similarly found in co-defendant cases that our leadership in the development of a unified information-management approach has facilitated teamwork among the defendants and saved our clients time and money.
We believe in a hands-on approach to system design for each case, so our lawyers generally lead the information design and data specifications, guided by our in-house experts in our Litigation Support and Information Technology groups or by more experienced lawyers at the Firm.
Extranet Availability and Management
Spriggs & Hollingsworth understands that clients and co-counsel require greater and more immediate access to the case information, including but not limited to contact information, production and discovery documents, and case calendars. In order to meet these needs, we have provided an Extranet and worked with multiple providers of litigation-support services to create an integrated, robust solution for providing this information. The customized integration of our Extranet with our practice management and document discovery management tools has created an Extranet that allows 24/7 remote access for the entire team of litigators and creates a team-information environment that allows for case-related knowledge to be shared at all times.
In addition to remote practice-management access through our Extranet system, we also provide web-sharing and collaboration of documents through our web-conferencing system (both in connection with the Extranet and on a free-standing basis). This allows our lawyers to collaborate with clients, co-counsel, and others through our computer system and provides for greater flexibility for the team to meet, discuss, and make changes in real-time to important case documents. This also saves our clients travel time and costs.
Document-Discovery Management
With document-discovery management, our experience is that a well-designed, tailored system achieves the greatest overall benefit to enhancing our effectiveness in litigation. For discovery documents, and depending on the size of the document collection, we often image the source documents using an imaging platform that enables us to capture at scan time important source and document-integrity information, such as file-folder information and attachment ranges. Automating the process of document capture has proven to reduce the time required to organize and collect documents in internal document sweeps. A sound discovery-document management system also utilizes coded databases for retrieval, and it is in the design and construction of cost-effective databases that Spriggs & Hollingsworth distinguishes itself. Our case-specific use of the twin concepts of document type and level of treatment enables us to allocate monies to those portions of the document population that are most useful for the litigation and to capture relatively more information about the more important documents. In some of our systems, we also text convert the imaged source document using optical-character-recognition technology to provide an alternate and flexible pathway into the discovery-document population. In addition, as increasing amounts of information reside in electronic formats without even migrating to hard copies, the document-discovery management systems we develop for our cases integrate electronic documents and hard-copy documents to facilitate the overall management and analysis of all documents - paper and electronic.
Spriggs & Hollingsworth has extensive experience in managing electronic discovery. We supervise electronic document sweeps and organize the production of electronic records from our clients. We work closely with our clients in ensuring compliance with obligations to preserve electronic documents and produce them in litigation; in this regard, we are especially mindful of the costs of accessing and producing electronic materials, and we seek to devise cost-effective strategies to balance the need to understand information contained in electronic format, the obligation to produce materials to the other side in litigation, and the potential for burdensome disruption to our clients' businesses that e-discovery can cause. We have worked with numerous electronic-discovery vendors. We also have utilized computer forensic experts, for example, in searching for evidence of financial misdeeds in recovered hard drives. We remain extraordinarily current on the latest technologies to manage and analyze electronic discovery, especially those using heuristic approaches and threaded-discussion management. In view of our extensive experience in this area, we find we increasingly are working with our clients in developing policies and technologies for corporate electronic records management.
Document-Discovery Management Team
Spriggs & Hollingsworth has a staff of attorneys dedicated to document management, including the identification, review, and production of electronic documents for the firm’s major pharmaceutical, products liability, toxic tort, and other complex litigation. The team ensures that all document productions meet the new e–discovery rules as well as the firm’s exacting QA and QC standards. The team provides efficient and cost-effective document management and discovery in the increasingly complex e–discovery environment in which our clients find themselves.
Deposition Management
In addition to our document discovery tools, our use and deployment of deposition-management software has proven to hold similar benefits. By storing and using depositions in an electronic format, we have found not only that we achieve efficiency gains in the search and retrieval of deposition testimony (and the avoidance of endless copying and recopying of deposition transcripts), but also that, by adapting our work processes to take advantage of the power of the software, we are able to utilize the deposition testimony more effectively and reduce the costs of extracting and managing important information. In a typical case, then, instead of having a paralegal prepare a written digest of a deposition, we may "issue code" electronically, which means identifying those sections of the deposition transcript that pertain to a list of pre-defined issues. Using the issue codes, a lawyer can generate a report instantly about what any given witness said about an issue or what every witness in the case said about the same issue. We have found this to be a powerful tool, particularly for mass-tort and serial litigation, because we can easily find, for example, all testimony from a recurring opposition expert about a particular topic so as to expose inconsistencies in the testimony or opinion offered. We similarly find that by using issue coding we can discover a typology of, for example, medical claimants against our clients by comparing testimony of exposure mechanisms, product identification, and disease types across the plaintiff cohort.
Trial Presentation and Preparation
The litigation-support system that we develop during the case can be rolled forward directly into our trial presentation. We increasingly find it cost effective to use trial-presentation software, which provides a structured way of retrieving documents and deposition excerpts (including digitized video deposition extracts) and presenting them to the jury and judge via oversized monitors in the courtroom. For us, this is not a matter of trying to intimidate the other side with our technological prowess. Rather, our use of these technologies has advanced to the point where the projection of images (including the ability to highlight sections of documents on screen and the like) seamlessly contributes to the smooth introduction of evidence and flow at trial. We are, of course, sensitive to competing considerations in whether to use this equipment or not at trial; generally speaking, however, juries today are comfortable with technology in the courtroom and seem to appreciate the greater clarity that presenting evidence in this manner provides, particularly in complex litigation.
Spriggs & Hollingsworth's lawyers work directly with our Trial Technology team to ensure that an effective technology solution is used and that the presentation provides the impact necessary without overburdening the court and jury with excessive technology. In addition to our trial presentation software, we also use on-site technology both inside the courtroom and at our local "war-room" to ensure that our lawyers and paralegals have ready access to the full information resources of the Firm.
Document Creation
Our lawyers' and paralegals' use of computer tools is not limited to elaborate litigation-support systems. We use a wide variety of applications other than litigation-support and word-processing software. We conduct regular training in-house on spreadsheet and presentation software, for example. Some of our lawyers keep their miscellaneous notes about cases in flat-file databases that are customized in-house; other lawyers and paralegals utilize graphics packages, dynamic outlining programs, decision-analysis software, and various financial-analysis programs. All documents created by our lawyers and paralegals are profiled in our document-management system, and our system permits other members of the litigation team to access the collective work product. Our lawyers are also able to mine our prior work product for research and other leads in their work for our current clients.
We believe that our Firm intelligently deploys software tools that contribute to our effectiveness in managing, analyzing, and presenting information, many of which have been road tested by some of our lawyers for a decade. In this regard, we maintain a research and development budget for the purposes of identifying and trying out new software, most of which are programs that we seek out because they are not marketed to law firms.
Network Infrastructure, Internal Computer Systems, and Support
The way we use computers requires that the Firm’s technology infrastructure maintains the highest levels of stability and speed. Consistent with our needs and our technology leadership, we are constantly reviewing new operating systems and implementing them as soon as they pass our technology testing and review. One of the drivers of our need for network capacity has been our use of imaging, which also spurred our decision to provide oversized monitors to all lawyers and paralegals to facilitate the review of documents and depositions on screen. Our lawyers and paralegals also research on, and share documents through, high-speed Internet connections, and they have the option to web-conference or videoconference with co-counsel and clients.
We have devoted substantial resources to facilitating remote access by our personnel, where we have deployed three separate remote-access systems to facilitate 24/7 connectivity. Our lawyers working at a remote trial site or from their homes have access remotely to the same resources that would be available if they were at the office. The Firm supports the use of handheld personal digital assistants and communications devices.
Spriggs & Hollingsworth also has implemented sophisticated accounting, time entry, and billing software to help us run our own business. All timekeepers enter time directly into their computers, and our technology allows time entry from handheld devices for lawyers who are traveling.
The Firm also maintains an Intranet, which provides information about events, benefits, and other internal news, plus useful links to legal research and related sites.
Finally, Spriggs & Hollingsworth has implemented state-of-the-art firewall, anti-spam, anti-spyware and anti-virus solutions to minimize intrusions and to safeguard our client files.
Our Information Systems group comprises network engineers, a communications specialist, and application specialists and trainers. Our Litigation Support Group, led by the Director of Litigation Support who has nearly 20 years’ experience in the field, additionally includes a database manager, a trial technologist and graphics specialist, and a database programmer.
Peer Recognition and Technology Presentations
Our leadership on all these fronts is reflected in the fact that our lawyers regularly are asked to speak to legal-technology and corporate-legal department groups about the state of the art in litigation support and electronic document management, including electronic-discovery matters. Vendors working on the needed functionality and future development of their products routinely seek our views; we are a beta-site for several litigation-support software packages. We have also helped develop software that was customized for litigation-support.
There are many examples of our lawyers and technology staff writing articles and presenting to their peers. Marc Mayerson has written on “Using Computers to Manage Large Litigation Document Populations Effectively: A Primer,” Law and the Information Society (17th Annual British & Irish Law, Education and Technology Association Conference 2002) and “Designing Litigation Support Databases,” TechnoLawyer (Dec. 2, 10 & 16, 2003) and has spoken at various legal-technology symposia on discovery management and technology tools for litigation. Brad Biegon has published, “A Primer on Assessing E-Discovery,” Legal Times (July 23, 2007), which focuses on trial-evidence issues concerning electronic records. Jeff Slater, Director of Litigation Support, routinely consults with leading litigation-support vendors on the development of their software tools.
Conclusion
Spriggs & Hollingsworth is committed to applying the best, most cost-effective technologies that add value in our representation of our clients and that ensure that computerization enhances the effective representation of our clients.
