F. Litigation Support and Project Management

• Author: Ted Tjaden
• Profession: National Director of Knowledge Management McMillan LLP
• Pages: 312-313

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Litigation support is often a special subset of law firm knowledge management, focusing less on the litigation precedent and legal research aspect of litigation but instead dealing with case management, document review, and electronic discovery. Depending on the firm, the knowledge management department may or may not be directly involved in litigation support. For firms with large litigation departments, there may be embedded PSLS or a large contingent of litigation paralegals who will play an important role in managing what is, increasingly, a huge volume of electronic documents related to a particular lawsuit. One key aspect of litigation support - a topic not well taught in law school - is project management and the need for the litigation support team to have strong project management skills to help with early case assessment and managing appropriate levels of resources for particular lawsuits.

Most law firms will contract out the initial stages of the e-discovery process that (typically) involves the scanning of large volumes of the client’s print and digital documents from the client’s servers, and then will package that content for review using appropriate document review software.³⁷There are a large number of software solutions dealing

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with document review and case management, including CASEMAP,³⁸CT

Summation,³⁹and Recommind’s Axcelerate EDISCOVERY Software.⁴⁰One challenge North American law firm knowledge managers are dealing with is the availability and suitability of outsourcing some or all of this document review work (and potentially other KM-related work) to India and other countries where the hourly wages of lawyers are much lower (this outsourcing is often called "Legal Process Outsourcing" (LPO)).⁴¹

[37] In Canada, for example, Platinum Legal Services (http://platinumlegalservices. com) and Commonwealth Legal Services (www.commonwealthlegal.com) are two firms that provide this type of service (as do many others). The trend towards e-discovery in Canada has also given rise to specialized, boutique law firms such as Wortzman Nickle (www.wortzmannickle.com), a law firm whose work focuses on e-discovery.

[38] CASEMAP: www.casesoft.com.

[39] CT Summation: www.ctsummation.com/.

[40]...