It is no secret that Australian lawyers are drowning in more information than they can handle. With the proliferation of massive volumes of email and electronic documents as an integral part of legal evidence, one of the biggest challenges in modern litigation is using limited resources intelligently to be able to undertake a fast and effective early case assessment that offers clients smart strategies based on real facts.
Justice George Palmer recently highlighted that a modern day ‘information overload’ was dragging cases on longer than needed and adding to inefficiencies in the court system. He commented that judges are deluged with ''10,000 utterly irrelevant documents'' and costs can escalate so high that neither side is prepared to settle.
The issues around litigation resourcing lie around the fact that many organisations are making significant increases in litigation spending, but this has not resulted in the creation of larger legal teams. Despite the rise in litigation, 79% of US companies reported employing five or fewer in-house lawyers and 61% of UK companies reported the same staffing deficiency. This lean staffing approach is occurring in Australia too and, coupled with the enormous volumes of information, has meant that lawyers who charge at high hourly rates are finding themselves doing time-consuming manual reviewing of documents instead of meaningful legal work. The result has been an increase in the costs to law firms and their clients and an inability for them to provide the best service to those clients.
A recent survey in Australia1 confirmed this notion that Australian lawyers are struggling to find the hours in the day to do their jobs, leading to a decrease in the standard of customer service and gross inefficiencies – four in five Australian lawyers saying they had discarded information without properly reading it because there was too much to get through.
Additionally, the research found that 20% of lawyers spend so much time researching that they don’t bill for it, and alarmingly, nearly half of the lawyers polled said that new entrants to the industry often leave because of the intensity of the information they need to work through.
There has been much achieved in the US with regards to harnessing technology to get faster, cheaper and better early case assessments for clients with limited legal resources. One recent example relates to a case which was fast approaching the trial date. Both sides required a fast and accurate means of gathering and preserving data yet didn’t have the manpower to go through and traditionally review all the information. Utilising modern early case assessment technology, both sides were able to have relevant data collected, culled, with a subset of potentially relevant documents put online, in just three days. The key evidence found led to an early settlement, saving time, cost and stress for all parties.
One Australian example is law firm Clayton Utz, who have built a highly regarded litigation support technology practice within their firm. Jonathan Prideaux, national manager of legal technology support at Clayton Utz cited one of the biggest benefits of embracing advanced eDiscovery technology has been the ability to react to client needs very quickly and provide greater cost control. He said: “Although our legal technology group is a profit centre, our primary purpose is to enable clients and lawyers to efficiently manage the huge volumes of data that are associated with disputes and regulatory investigations.”
Law firms who have embraced early case assessment technology have seen significant benefits. They have found that they have a much more solid understanding of the facts of the case and can advise their clients much more effectively as a result. Additionally, they have removed much of the manual data reviewing, which is expensive, inaccurate and most of all, takes away from lawyer’s ability to do their job.
Resourcing litigation will only become more challenging as digital information continues to increase. By using fast, scalable technology to thoroughly investigate a case and identify the key facts and context in which that information lies, law firms will find that the concept of resourcing the legal process becomes less of a challenge. Not only that, they will be future proofing their operations by harnessing technology to allow their legal professionals to use their skill set to the best of their abilities, while improving the outcome for themselves and their clients by identifying the most relevant documents earlier in the litigation process than ever before.
