Situation

The discovery team of a global Fortune 10 energy company required assistance to support internal case teams and outside counsel with the day-to-day planning, coordination and execution of discovery tasks. The company knew its paralegals did not have the appropriate bandwidth or domain expertise to manage the discovery process across its litigation portfolio and, as a result, processes were inconsistently applied across matters, and a significant portion of administrative discovery tasks were being neglected or performed by expensive outside counsel.

Solutions

Our professionals:

• Served as seconded case managers providing daily on-site and remote support across the full discovery spectrum, from matter initiation and planning through collection, processing, review, production and matter close.
• Provided subject matter expertise and guidance to case teams on best practices for managing/prioritizing large-scale data collections, developing defensible yet effective search criteria, setting up efficient document review protocols and producing documents.
• Helped define and document a new discovery support framework to align the right tasks with the right resources and ensure clarity of roles and responsibilities across the in-house attorney, paralegals, collections team, seconded case manager and outside counsel.
• Enhanced existing and created new discovery forms, checklists and trackers to standardize the application of processes across matters and enhance tracking and reporting capabilities while performing the work on the matter.

Benefits

The company’s discovery process defensibility and efficiency were significantly enhanced, as were the quality of their deliverables and ability to meet discovery deadlines. Furthermore, the company was able to achieve cost savings by “in-sourcing” the discovery work to our lower-cost, seconded resources using a fixed pricing arrangement as opposed to outside counsel’s higher hourly rates while also building internal domain expertise through the daily on-site collaboration with our team.