How Do You Tame Your Complex Litigation? Process Is Key
November 20, 2024
By:
Summary: MDLs and other complex litigations are high-stakes and full of risk. Discover how an innovative process can streamline your approach, minimizing the chance for key information to slip.
Modern data volumes make the fact-finding and case strategy preparation process challenging in any litigation or investigation. In multi-district litigations (MDLs) and other massive litigations, those challenges become exponentially amplified.
MDLs test even the most seasoned teams. You need to understand the key timelines, issues, facts, and people involved in each jurisdiction—but the documents that tell those stories lie buried within numerous, voluminous datasets. These challenges lead to two common and costly problems in MDLs:
- Finding key information late: Ineffective or inefficient search efforts mean that key docs are found late in the game, or worse, are missed completely.
- Wasted time and money: Redundant and ineffective search efforts across teams, coupled with poor information sharing, waste time, derail litigation attorneys, and distract review teams from their primary review tasks.
So, what can you do to improve your fact-finding process and make sure your next MDL is a success?
Four pillars of process improvement
At Lighthouse we look at four specific areas when assessing workflow improvement opportunities in eDiscovery. Because complex and mass litigation amplify inefficiencies, it is especially important to look back at these areas from previous MDL experiences when planning for your next MDL.
Focus on areas with the biggest delays and redundancies
- Did team members lose valuable hours reviewing similar or irrelevant “hot documents” flagged by review teams?
- Did team members spend more time trying to find the right documents to look at versus digesting critical information for case strategy and preparation?
- Did contract review teams spend time analyzing and tagging “hot documents" that weren’t useful to litigation teams?
Assess areas of risk and past errors
- Was a review strategy derailed after new information was revealed late in the game?
- Was counsel blindsided by a damaging document in a deposition, hearing, or trial?
- Was a potential strategy missed because key “good” documents were missed?
Analyze communication breakdowns
- Did one case team have access to key documents that another team didn’t?
- Were different teams reviewing or searching for the same or similar information?
- Did team members with institutional knowledge shift to other matters, taking valuable institutional knowledge with them?
Identify technology, expertise, and experience gaps
- Was the search technology used for finding key documents built for document review needs?
- Did people tasked with finding the critical documents have information retrieval expertise?
- Was key document identification a task assigned to review and litigation attorneys as a secondary task?
Improving fact-finding in an MDL: a success story
Our search experts have spent decades honing effective workflows in MDLs, with a focus on process improvement in the areas outlined above. You can see how these strategic process changes led to better outcomes in a recent massive MDL.
This particular MDL spanned 30 U.S. jurisdictions, encompassed more than 25 million documents, and included a Joint Defense Group (JDG) of 11 international law firms plus several other firms representing companies outside the JDG. Those firms hired Lighthouse to handle fact-finding and key document identification. Our experts created a strategic fact-finding process, including the following elements.
Assigned a small team of search experts with expertise in linguistics and information retrieval to handle all key document identification efforts.
Impact:
- More accurate search results and lower risk of late-stage surprises.
- Review and litigation teams stayed focused on their primary tasks (improving efficacy and efficiency of those tasks).
- Centralized institutional knowledge and improved information sharing.
Leveraged advanced search technology purpose-built for key document identification (vs. review platform search tools).
Impact:
- Experts yielded faster and more accurate search results by conducting sophisticated analytic searches that are not possible with review platform tools.
Created a centralized 24-hour search desk for all ad hoc search requests from litigation teams.
Impact:
- Greatly reduced redundant and duplicative searching.
- Key documents were quickly shared with other teams interested in them.
Created a custom topic map of all discovery requests to coordinate search topics across matters.
Impact:
- Reduced redundant and duplicative searches by identifying areas of overlap across jurisdictions.
- Lowered the risk of missing critical documents by ensuring consistent coverage of all jurisdictional needs.
Created a re-deployable linguistic model workflow based on linguists’ intimate knowledge of the language in the datasets.
Impact:
- Improved the efficiency of key document identification, allowing experts to quickly sort documents based on the likelihood that they contained key information.
Created a deposition kit bundle workflow that grouped deposition kit requests from the same jurisdictions and departments together.
Impact:
- Improved effectiveness and efficiency of searches by enabling searching of smaller collections of documents and deponent-agnostic search approach.
Results
- Budget control: Improved workflows meant that one small team delivered 1,300 deposition kits, 130 state and defensive overviews, and supported hundreds of ad hoc search requests.
- Upleveled case strategy and preparation: Case teams were better prepared for depositions, hearings, and trials because they were handed the most important documents to digest.
- Better litigation outcomes: A more effective search process meant much lower incidents of damaging surprises and last-minute pivots.
How you can get started
I hope these tips poise you to improve fact-finding processes in your next complex matter—or at least think about opportunities for improvement.
To dive deeper into ways litigators can find innovative solutions to common eDiscovery problems—check out our free eBook, The Litigator’s Innovation Blueprint. And to learn more about how Lighthouse combines technology and expertise to advance your fact-finding and case strategy preparation, visit our key document identification page.
About the Author
