May 2008. Litigation Best Practices in a Box(TM) is a tool used by many of the largest law firms in the world to assist with litigation discovery materials. It has pre-defined standards, procedures, logs, and forms, and is instrumental to law firms in complying with the Rules of Civil Procedure for handling electronic discovery.
Ibrahim Dabo interviews Jane Gennarelli, a Principal of Magellan’s Law Corporation, and also the original creator of Litigation Best Practices in a Box™. Gennarelli is a leading expert in litigation management, and has thirty years of experience in this field. While responding to questions, she talks exclusively about her company, the product, and how many leading law firms are benefiting from it.
IBRAHIM DABO: Please give a brief overview about your organization, Magellan’s Law Corporation.
JANE GENNARELLI: Magellan’s Law Corporation is a product and consulting company that assists attorneys and paralegals in effectively handling and managing litigation discovery materials. Our flagship product — Best Practices in a Box ™ — is a browser-based tool that includes predefined standards, procedures, logs and forms for all of the tasks associated with handling litigation discovery materials — both paper and electronic documents. It incorporates procedures for complying with the rules of civil procedure for electronic discovery. The product is customized by our clients to include firm-specific information and preferences. The tool permits a law firm to quickly and easily implement a customized best practices program that is a good fit with its practice.
Law firms use the product to attain consistency in the way in which discovery materials are handled, to improve quality and reduce costs for these tasks, to train new associates, paralegals and litigation technical staff, and to ensure that litigation technology is optimally used. Firms also use it as a marketing tool. Attorneys show it to potential clients to demonstrate the firm’s commitment to providing high-quality, cost effective representation. It is currently in use by firms of all sizes across the country.
In addition, we provide related consulting services. We assist law firms in determining the right resources for supporting their litigators — we make staff, technology and process recommendations. We also have significant case-specific experience in managing discovery activities for our clients.
You are the original creator of Litigation Best Practices in a Box™. When and how did you come up with the idea of creating this product? What was your motivation?
I have been working in litigation for 30 years. In that time, I’ve assisted thousands of attorneys with managing case discovery documents. In that time, I’ve also seen law firms – time and again – manage various document handling tasks on their own (tasks like collecting responsive documents from their clients, screening those documents for privilege, coding those documents for a database, and so on). In almost all of those situations, I observed that law firms were not applying some very basic project management techniques to the work they were doing. Some of my observations were:
1. They didn’t plan the activities — they didn’t create schedules or budgets or determine what resources they needed.
2. They didn’t use written procedures.
3. They didn’t adequately train people doing the work.
4. They didn’t take quality control steps to ensure that the work was being done right and that it was consistent.
5. They didn’t track what they were doing or keep any productivity or status records
The results were almost always the same: they missed court deadlines, databases weren’t ready by when they were needed, the quality did not meet expectations, and the work cost more than it needed to.
I recognized a problem that I wanted to fix. In 2000, I became an independent consultant focusing on assisting law firms in creating and developing best practices programs. In 2001, I started working on the first release of a Best Practices product, which was in pdf form. In 2003, Jim Feuerstein and I formed Magellan’s Law Corporation. Jim converted the pdf version into html and we released the first html version in late 2003.
What is the idea behind the name “Best Practices in a Box”? Why “in a box”?
In recent years, more and more law firms are recognizing the need to implement best practices for handling their discovery materials. Aside from our clients, few firms have gotten very far along. In most cases, they have the expertise to create best practices, but they simply don’t have the time. It is an overwhelming task. Drafting best practices from scratch is a full-time job for months and months and months. We use the phrase “in a box” in our product name to imply ease of implementation. Most of our clients customize the product before using it, so they are not all using it right “out of the box”. But using our product as the basis for their best practices is a much more efficient approach. We wanted a name that implied its ease of implementation.
How easy do your new clients find it to use this product?
In short, very. It’s browser based, so anyone that can use the internet can use our product. Feedback from our clients has been that the content is clear, easy to understand, thorough, and well-organized.
Describe the success of this product, and especially the impact of the new release, Version 3.0?
I think the success of the product should be viewed in two ways.
1. Its success as a product for Magellan’s Law Corporation — the developers and distributors who are building a business around it.
2. Its success at our clients and as a contribution to the litigation arena as a whole.
Let me briefly discuss each of these points.
Its success at Magellan’s Law Corporation:
Our client base is vast and diverse. The product has been purchased by some of the largest law firms in the world, as well as by very small firms with only 1 or 2 attorneys. Our clients are located across the continental US and in Canada.
Most of our clients are law firms with hundreds or thousands of attorneys that are located in major US markets. It is rare that I speak to a litigation support professional who is not familiar with our product.
Our sales have seen a sharp increase since the release of version 3.0. Law firms across the country are looking for tools to help them comply with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure regarding electronic discovery, and release 3.0 provides thorough coverage of those rules.
Its success at our clients and in the litigation arena:
Law firms — as a rule — have not historically been known for implementing standards and procedures for handling tasks.
They have in the past few years recognized a need for doing so for handling litigation discovery materials (especially for handling electronic discovery). As a result, law firms are scrambling to develop and implement standards. That is a huge undertaking and most firms lack the resources to develop such a program in a timely manner.
Our product — the only one of its kind — solves that problem for them. They simply customize our pre-defined standards to fit their practice, and they are able to have a program up and running in weeks or months, rather than years.
The benefits to our clients are significant, and therein lies the “success”: they are able to provide high-quality, cost-effective representation in a way that eluded them in the past.
It’s “success” can also be viewed by its contribution to the litigation arena: this product has raised awareness in the litigation community regarding the need for best practices.
Our product has helped to elevate that “need” to a new level: because so many large firms have licensed our product, other firms find themselves in a position where they recognize they need to do something to stay competitive.
How is this product different from other litigation management products?
Magellan’s Law Best Practices in a Box ™ is the only product of its kind. That is, it is the only product on the market that is a collection of procedures for all of the tasks associated with handling litigation discovery materials and that is aimed at helping a law firm to implement a best practices program. Other litigation support products include software tools for housing images and data for discovery documents, tools for processing electronic discovery, tools for handling transcripts (for depositions, for example), and tools for presenting materials at trial. They are software tools, not content tools.
For the benefit of readers who are unfamiliar with this concept, what is e-discovery?
E-discovery (or “electronic discovery”) has become a huge factor in litigation today. To understand it, you need to understand a little about the litigation process. Let me explain that in very general terms.
Discovery — one of the first activities in a law suit — is the process by which each side in a law suit turns over relevant materials to the other side. In most law suits, that means turning over documents that include relevant information. In years past, that meant turning over paper. In large cases, hundreds of millions of pages of documents may have been turned over in a single case. Paper documents were collected from files, and word processing documents and emails were printed to paper and produced. In the last 10 years or so, a transition has been occurring, and document productions have been changing from mostly paper to mostly electronic. Exchanging paper still happens, but today it’s usually the smaller portion of a document production. Electronic discovery is the process of collecting, processing, culling, reviewing and producing discovery documents in electronic form.
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Jane Gennarelli was among notable speakers who presented at The International Litigation Support Leaders Conference in Washington, D.C., between 15 and 16 May, 2008.
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