This coming Tuesday, November 16, at 2:00 pm Eastern/11:00 am Pacific, I will be moderating an hour-long “virtual panel” (think CNN or MSNBC on your desktop, with each of the panelists and yours truly appearing in their own window) on “Hosted Litigation Support–Buy or Build?”
There is little question that the structure of law firms is changing in the wake of the economic “Great Reset,” and that those structures will continue to evolve, sometimes in unforeseen ways, as we move into the second decade of the 21st Century. Clearly, the intersection of changing client needs, unprecedented price pressures, and the relentless progress of technology solutions represent opportunities as well as unanticipated pitfalls and challenges.
In this new age, hosted litigation support is emblematic of these opportunities and pitfalls. As you grapple with the prospect of its becoming a fact of life, several critical considerations need to be addressed as your firm develops its hosted litigation support strategy.
One of the most basic is whether to build your own or buy – and if you do choose to buy, what are the comparative advantages and disadvantages of the alternatives available on the market, not the least important being cost/performance tradeoffs.
This is of course only a start. Other critical issues surround:
- Security and data integrity
- Ethical requirements surrounding your firm’s “duty to supervise” the support provider–which the courts have, so far, interpreted as imposing virtual strict liability on the law firm; and
- Ensuring that any service provider you might choose has sufficiently robust hardware and software infrastructures to deal with what can be massive amounts of data which need to be put online, securely backed up and archived, and made accessible worldwide 24/7 under the most rigorous data protection and confidentiality requirements.
This panel will address the practical and ethical issues inherent in various approaches to hosted litigation support, providing guidance on how to minimize risk, while ensuring optimal outcomes both for your firm and your firm’s clients. This is largely new territory; come explore with us in the company of those on the cutting edge.
Moderated by:
Bruce MacEwen, President of Adam Smith, Esq.
Panelists:
Scott Preston, Chief Information Officer, Fulbright & Jaworski
Peggy Stulberg, Director of Litigation Technology, Bingham McCutchen
This live virtual panel will be delivered to your desk via a new technology – virtual panel discussions, or vPanels, providing the dynamism of panel discussions without having to leave your office.
vPanel technology is driven by Shift Worldwide.
Hope to “see” you then!
