Although our firm can be helpful on almost any type of legal matter, we are especially helpful to clients that have large or complex legal matters or a large portfolio of smaller legal matters.
Large matters have unique operating and logistical challenges created by their size. A large number of legal professionals working on a matter can significantly benefit from a structured work process like Novus One-Touch™. A common, open-access repository for case-related information like Novus C3™ ensures a consistent work product throughout. A meticulous quality-control program like Novus Q™ prevents ambiguities from negatively affecting quality. Large volumes of documents also create logistical challenges that require technology expertise and the type of rigorous process control provided by Novus One-Touch™ to reduce the risk associated with overlooked, lost or inadvertently produced documents.
The high degree of structure and organization provided by the Novus Process™ made our completion of a recent qui tam matter with eight million pages of documents possible. We received 59 collections and made 19 productions of documents on a rolling basis to keep pace with depositions and court orders. In the process, we prepared 16 key issue files, 101 witness files, written summaries of 6,200 documents, and a privilege log with 4,800 documents, all on an accelerated schedule.
Complex matters have unique challenges created by the interdependency and opacity of facts that legal professionals need to find and link together to form a cohesive story. Sometimes the story is not apparent at the beginning of a matter and a structured process like Novus One-Touch™, which ensures that no stone remains unturned, is necessary. Other times, fact patterns are so disparate or complex that an assembly of the facts through a collaboration application like Novus C3™ is required. When legal professionals have to connect the dots in complex matters, a scientific quality control program like Novus Q™ ensures that every important document will find its way into the story.
Without Novus C3™, it would have been virtually impossible for 60 lawyers on three continents to uncover the story of an $800 million financial fraud buried deep within three million pages of documents written in 17 languages, including everything from German to Vietnamese. While sifting through documents for both civil and criminal matters, the members of our team collaboratively exchanged information with one another more than 3,600 times to report what really happened and, in the process, created 572 witness and key issue files.
Case portfolios present unique challenges because while each matter has its own fact pattern, some may have similar facts, issues, characteristics or witnesses. A successful portfolio management strategy preserves the uniqueness of each matter while leveraging economies of scale and standard work product across the portfolio. This requires a strategy that uses Novus One-Touch™ and Novus Q™ to ensure a standardized work product across all matters, making it easier to use and repurpose work across matters. It also requires that each matter have a separate Novus C3™ to preserve its unique information and an enterprise-wide litigation management portal that combines all of the Novus C3™ applications. This enables our clients and their lawyers to find, leverage, or repurpose common facts, issues, and characteristics across the portfolio.
As an integral litigation management partner to one enterprise client, we began work on a new matter for them on average every 17 days over several years. In doing so, we worked with 33 of our client’s law firms on a wide variety of class action, environmental, labor and employment, and insurance-related matters. In the process, we built an enterprise-wide litigation management portal for our client, and developed tailored work processes and automated workflows that achieved economies and efficiencies of scale only possible on an enterprise-wide level.