Crane on Law by James Crane

The American Corporate Counsel Association (ACCA) conducted a survey of corporate law departments to measure the satisfaction level with their outside counsel. It may not come as a big surprise, but nearly 70% of in-house attorneys are dissatisfied with the outside law firms they use, and a third of all corporations fired at least one of their law firms.

Without diving too deep into the statistics, I can tell you that the biggest issue is the budget. First, whether it’s a litigation support partner, like Altep, or the outside law firm, or the in-house lawyer, we all serve the same master: the Budget. Corporate counsel has the daunting task of providing the best legal representation to the corporation at the best value. When outside law firms aren’t mindful of the costs of executing a legal matter, there is bound to be conflict.

Altep has built its reputation as a staunch advocate for corporate law departments when it comes to cost efficient execution of litigation. In fact, our next-generation online review platform, Inspicio(TM), was developed from the ground-up with cost savings in mind. We believed that corporations were paying too much for processing of their digital data. There was no need to process every document to images (TIFF or PDF) when only a fraction of the document population needs to be produced. With Inspicio(TM), documents can be reviewed in their native format, which costs about 75% less for processing. Then, the corporation only pays for the small fraction of production documents to be processed to image. This innovation is literally saving our partners hundreds of thousands of dollars in processing costs.

Another feature of Inspicio(TM) was inspired by numerous requests from our corporate law department partners. It has a real-time dashboard that monitors progress across cases, custodians, and client databases. A majority of corporate lawyers responsible for billing reconciliation have experienced the unpleasant surprise of a review project that has gotten out of hand, resulting in a bill that is many times what they expected. Using Inspicio(TM), corporations now have control over their documents and control over each matter. At any time, corporate counsel can monitor progress down to an individual reviewer, and get accurate, up-to-the-minute reports on time spent, documents reviewed and work remaining for any case or project in the corporation’s litigation database.

These are only a couple of ways that Altep has developed cost-efficient innovations for the execution of corporate defense litigation. Contact me to discuss additional techniques involving work product archiving, theme-based pre-discovery preparation, re-purposing productions, and more.