Six Steps to an Efficient Litigation Workflow
[See how Bloomberg Law brings you the tools to streamline your work and get the answers you need, quickly.]
Law firms of all sizes are looking for better ways to retain and grow a client base, control costs, and get the right information at the right time.
According to Altman Weil’s Law Firms in Transition Survey, legal industry insiders expect the following challenges to be permanent changes to the industry:
- Focus on improved practice efficiency
- More price competition
- Competition from nontraditional service providers
- More non-hourly billing
- Corporate clients doing more work in-house
With challenges come opportunities, and law firms today can leverage sophisticated technology to succeed – particularly in practice areas that are expected to grow in demand, such as litigation.
Now more than ever, legal technology is necessary to help prepare for litigation. The amount of analytical data, evidence, and case law information is so substantial that we need smart technology to make sense of it all. The right legal technology platform will support you from the moment litigation is initiated throughout the full litigation workflow.
What is legal tech?
Legal technology helps attorneys sift through thousands of cases quickly and comprehensively. These products can also help aggregate or summarize data in a way that is more useful.
For example, before litigation analytics were common, a partner may have asked a junior associate to find all summary judgment motions ruled on by a specific judge to determine how often that judge grants or denies them. The attorney could have done so by manually searching over PACER and/or by searching through court opinions, but that would take a long time. Now, Litigation Analytics can aggregate that data and provide an answer in seconds.
Automating parts of the research process with legal technology frees up time and effort for other activities that benefit the client and makes legal research and writing more efficient.
Because a legal technology platform can sift through so much more legal data than a human can, there is an increase in the breadth and quality of the research. These legal tech products can make connections and associations that an attorney might not think to make and can overturn stones an attorney might not think to turn over. Legal tech tools help instill confidence that more relevant cases are reviewed than ever before.
Litigation Workflow in Six Steps with Legal Tech
1. Get to know your client
With Bloomberg Law’s 3.5 million downloadable company profiles, you can complete your client research all in one place. Access a company’s available financial statements, shareholder information and filings, management profiles, credit ratings, capital structure data, SEC filings, and more. Legal technology can empower you to quickly see and compare the types of litigation a company is involved in and where the cases are located with Litigation Analytics.
2. Evaluate the litigation issues
Once you’re familiar with your client and the particular business atmosphere they may be facing, the next step is to get up to speed on the relevant litigation issues at play. Bloomberg Law’s Litigation Practical Guidance has easy-to-understand overviews, checklists, sample forms, and comparison tables – all annotated by former litigators who share best practices based on their experience.
[To read more about how legal tech and AI in legal research can improve attorney productivity and efficiency, download Bloomberg Law’s free report, Litigation Essentials – Legal Tech Tools for the Modern Practitioner.]
3. Investigate your judge’s case history with legal tech
Armed with data-based knowledge – understanding how certain motions and appeals resolved and the relationships among parties, law firms, and areas of law – you can better predict outcomes, timing, and case costs. Legal research technology, like Litigation Analytics, offer fast access to information on all sitting federal District Court judges – their profiles, past work and current cases, cited opinions, decisions by motion outcomes, appeals outcomes, length of case, appearances, and case type.
4. Conduct legal research
With the artificial intelligence-driven legal technologies on Bloomberg Law, the days of sifting through irrelevant court opinions are over. Litigators can jump-start their legal research by uploading their opponent’s brief into Brief Analyzer to instantly see case citations and links to relevant, expert intelligence. Brief Analyzer integrates seamlessly into your workflow so you can spend less time on analysis and more time on crafting a winning strategy. In fact, 94% of Brief Analyzer beta users reported that it reduced the time required to research a brief and prepare a response.
5. Draft the response
When you reach this stage of your litigation, turn to legal technology to save you time in finding the right legal argument for your case and drafting a winning response. Docket Key is Bloomberg Law’s proprietary document classification system; it uses a form of artificial intelligence to pinpoint the filings you are looking for, not simply those that mention the keyword. With a legal tech tool like Docket Key, users can limit unnecessary steps in the legal research process by navigating directly to the desired document.
6. Remain aware of risks
Finally, as the litigation progresses, you’ll want to keep an eye out for anything that could impact your client’s case. Bloomberg Law’s unmatched news coverage is urgent, relevant, and thorough – with real-time coverage reported by a global network of experienced journalists and unlimited alerts that allow you to set the time, frequency, and topics. While some legal news outlets take hours, even days, to report the same developments, Bloomberg Law’s stories are posted within minutes, so you’ll know the news before your colleagues, clients, and competitors.
[For guidance on how to leverage legal technology to ensure the best outcome for the organizations and clients you represent, download our free report, Litigation Essentials – Legal Tech Tools for the Modern Practitioner.]