Document management: key to winning complex litigation

Modern litigation is grossly inefficient in the classic economic sense according to respected time-tested management principles and by any metric used to evaluate return on investment.

Reading documents

A great deal of the time spent during litigation involves reading documents, but the hourly billing culture provides no incentive to optimize efficiency in that activity.
According to research by a third party litigation management company, lawyers only spend 12%—seven minutes out of every hour— reading documents, deciding what to do about the document ,and then doing it.

Reading documents is certainly necessary, but it doesn’t create value on its own. 88% percent of the time reading documents, however, appears to be unavoidable waste because it must be done. Unavoidable waste, however, is only unavoidable the first time. Every time a document must be read again represents at least an 88% percent avoidable waste of time. The larger and more complex the lawsuit, the more avoidable waste off time.

Lawyers waste time; but still bill for it

While law firm management believes that more eyeballs on a document reduces the likelihood of a mistake —particularly when each pair of eyeballs is billing the time they spend looking —decades of research establishes that more mistakes are introduced through repetition than are removed by repetition. Quality never results from doing a task repeatedly, but rather from doing it right the first time. Quality management programs are an exercise in engineering everything to achieve that result.

The elements of document management

Document management begins with creating electronic, and only when absolutely necessary, hard copy libraries of key documents categorized by relevance, privilege and other subjective criteria; creating and maintaining paper and electronic files; developing and maintaining a privilege log; and establishing a cybersecure electronic document depository, and deploying a database management system for all the documents in the database or databases.

What is often overlooked in the midst of frenetic and often frantic document-related activities is a clearly stated, well-defined statement of goals and objectives for the litigation, a strategic plan to attain those goals and accomplish those objectives, and a time and expense budget.

Large and complex Litigation

For major litigation involving large numbers of documents, the document repository and document management computer center must be located at the clients facility and accessible to counsel only subject to appropriate security precautions maintained by the client. Company management must have full knowledge of who is accessing their documents, which documents are being accessed, and under what circumstances.

Document scanning and data conversion should be provided by the Company in the way that is most cost effective for the Company not most profitable for the lawyers.
Law firms have no business becoming involved in document scanning. Under no circumstances should any business allow documents to leave Company premises and be housed at a law firm.

To pay a law firm for the cost of providing a secure depository for documents is ill-advised. Law firms are not in the business of providing security and have no expertise in this area.
Lawyers add work product to the document data base by annotating and consolidating the documents into meaningful information— meaningful to the client, counsel, and the courts.