Product Review Using Ringtail CaseBook to Manage Complex Litigation

Bryan Cave LLP is an 800-lawyer firm with litigators in eight U.S. cities and London. In 2002, the firm asked me to evaluate our litigation technology and litigation support services. For better or worse, we had neither budget nor staff during the first 9 months. While we could not affect any immediate change, this was the ideal opportunity to do a needs assessment, survey the available technology, evaluate the trends in the market, and ultimately plan and budget for implementation.

Defining & Evaluating Business Needs

Bryan Cave operates on a “one firm” philosophy, meaning that we view our lawyers as a conglomerate pool of resources rather than geographically isolated pockets of talent. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of Bryan Cave's client service is the promise of bringing to bear any expertise of the firm regardless of location to best meet the client's needs. In the litigation practice, however, logistical hurdles were potentially restraining our effectiveness.

The litigation support applications the firm was using at that time were fat client applications that pointed to local network drives. Because of both the applications used and our architecture, we were unable to share anything other than transcripts between offices. As a practical matter, this meant that the lawyers in each geographic location had to have their own copies of discovery documents, pleadings, correspondence, etc. Worse, it meant that any notes, comments, highlighting or other analysis could not be shared except through cumbersome and time-consuming methods. Thus, lawyers were being brought into a matter being handled by another office solely for their expertise on legal issues and rarely participated in a soup-to-nuts representation.

We saw an opportunity for greater degrees of cross-office staffing. Although creating a real time collaboration environment itself was a worthy goal, there were ancillary benefits in the form of managing workload capacities among lawyers in different offices and allowing coastal lawyers to deliver effective legal services at lower cost by staffing matters with lawyers from our offices in the Midwest that have lower billing rates.

In addition, we had researched with keen interest the legal technology literature on client extranets and the rise of litigation database Application Service Providers (ASPs). It would be important to offer clients the opportunity to access their litigation materials, to collaborate with clients, and to share litigation materials with the local counsel we work with across the country. For the sake of both efficiency and increasing the likelihood of actual use, we believed that the case management tool and the extranet should be one and the same as to not divert the firm's lawyers from their routine workflow.

Finally, our litigation technology decisions had to jive with the rest of the firm. We were then a mixed Novell/Microsoft shop but in the process of migrating to a complete Microsoft solution. We had SQL, Web, and security resources, and realized the potential benefits of an open architecture ' providing the ability to do limited customizations, particularly publishing data from one application in another.

Product Selection

Taking into account the firm's geographic dispersion, business needs, client service goals, and our technology platform including the likely need for external collaboration, we believed a Web-based solution sitting atop a SQL database was the most logical choice.

In the summer of 2002, there were only three “bring-it-home-in-the box” products of this type on the market. (Today, there would be three or more additional options, and all of the products have evolved.) We selected Ringtail Casebook by Ringtail Solutions for several reasons:

• Unified Web interface for all users: One competing product had a Web interface for some users and a fat client interface for others. While the fat client version certainly offered greater features, we valued unified training and support more greatly than the ability to put a fat client application in the hands of a few power users;
• Rich feature set to handle complex litigation: CaseBook had enough features to handle our most demanding cases, but enough controls and security levels to “turn off” features and functionality not essential to a given case team. Although one competing product had a very simple user interface (and was attractive for that reason), users would end up sacrificing features and flexibility in return. Staying true to our philosophy of standardizing technology across the firm, we knew that CaseBook could become our case management and repository standard platform, limiting the training of lawyers and legal assistants to one application rather than three or four, and simplifying the overall advanced planning process;
• The right “bells & whistles”: CaseBook's features seemed to be a good “fit” with the way our lawyers work. We valued the method of structuring data sets into levels, giving lawyers a navigable, “Windows Explorer” view of all case materials. We also wanted the ability to do in-house scanning of daily, low-volume materials such as pleadings and correspondence. Casebook allows uploading scanned, word-searchable PDFs ' something we routinely do for non-evidentiary materials.

Implementing CaseBook

Implementation required a Web server, a SQL server, IIS, and the storage space required to house case materials. We first ran the product in a test environment and then pushed it out to production servers where users could access the tool from the firm's intranet.

All servers are housed in the firm's St. Louis location, and we've experienced excellent performance across the WAN, particularly for standard, single-page .tif images. The system has been uncannily stable; we have had very few periods of down time, most of which have been attributable to hardware hiccups. The only item to install on local machines is Ringtail's image viewer, a tiny application. Ringtail issues periodic updates, and while we run those in our test environment before pushing them into production, we've never encountered a technical issue or needed to roll back.

We support the system with two litigation support analysts who perform data and image loading, production, export, data normalization and other tasks too “technical” for legal assistants. We have one technical resource we call on from time to time to assist with updates on the servers, deleting data for archived cases and other technical functions. A litigation support coordinator, as well as the analysts, advises lawyers and legal assistants on best practices, database design, and direct vendors on coding and EDD projects.

Firm-wide Adoption

As you might expect, lawyers (we're never first in line to learn a new technology tool) adopted the tool slowly. At Bryan Cave, adoption of Ringtail CaseBook has been driven by the need to collaborate with clients, co-counsel or among Bryan Cave offices as well as the requirement of housing more data than we could store on our local file servers when using the firm's previous fat client applications.

Only 2 years after we went live with the system, we have had roughly 100 cases and over 200 users on the system, including a number of external users. We have allowed controlled access to clients, co-counsel, and expert witnesses. We have used cross-office staffing to a greater degree, allowing us to apply industry/legal expertise more readily and to complete time-sensitive projects by contributing time from available lawyers around the firm. We have created many document productions, hosted scores of gigabytes of native electronic files for review and are now in the process of making our first production of native documents. We have performed one custom integration (pulling data from CompuLaw's Vision docketing system and putting it into the Casebook calendar), and are exploring others.

An additional CaseBook benefit is the capability to host internally electronic discovery projects by posting native files for review. Attorneys and legal assistants review native files in Casebook (using the Quick View Plus plug-in). Outside vendors convert selected, responsive files to .tif for later production. As a result, we can begin an EDD review quickly, avoiding charges for ASPs, massive .tif conversions and EDD project managers ' which saves the firm's clients considerable expense.

Next Generation Technology

While Ringtail Casebook has surprisingly few weak spots, improvements could be made with the Import/Export Manager, the searchability of production Bates numbers and the Advanced Full Text Search interface. The latter is added functionality that is being delivered in Ringtail Legal 2005, a new product from FTI Consulting that introduces some significant feature enhancements on the previous Ringtail CaseBook product, as well as underlying changes to improve speed, security and ease of administration.

In Summary

Ringtail Solutions Casebook fits beautifully with Bryan Cave's “One Firm” approach to handling client matters. Because Casebook is a Web-based case management system, we can apply legal talent from multiple Bryan Cave offices to a single client matter without duplication. The ability to share case information with clients and co-counsel has made Casebook an integral part of meeting client needs. Our case teams are now experiencing great efficiencies with native electronic file review and workflow processes we have designed for managing discovery, creating greater value for our clients.

Bryan Cave LLP is an 800-lawyer firm with litigators in eight U.S. cities and London. In 2002, the firm asked me to evaluate our litigation technology and litigation support services. For better or worse, we had neither budget nor staff during the first 9 months. While we could not affect any immediate change, this was the ideal opportunity to do a needs assessment, survey the available technology, evaluate the trends in the market, and ultimately plan and budget for implementation.

Defining & Evaluating Business Needs

Bryan Cave operates on a “one firm” philosophy, meaning that we view our lawyers as a conglomerate pool of resources rather than geographically isolated pockets of talent. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of Bryan Cave's client service is the promise of bringing to bear any expertise of the firm regardless of location to best meet the client's needs. In the litigation practice, however, logistical hurdles were potentially restraining our effectiveness.

The litigation support applications the firm was using at that time were fat client applications that pointed to local network drives. Because of both the applications used and our architecture, we were unable to share anything other than transcripts between offices. As a practical matter, this meant that the lawyers in each geographic location had to have their own copies of discovery documents, pleadings, correspondence, etc. Worse, it meant that any notes, comments, highlighting or other analysis could not be shared except through cumbersome and time-consuming methods. Thus, lawyers were being brought into a matter being handled by another office solely for their expertise on legal issues and rarely participated in a soup-to-nuts representation.

We saw an opportunity for greater degrees of cross-office staffing. Although creating a real time collaboration environment itself was a worthy goal, there were ancillary benefits in the form of managing workload capacities among lawyers in different offices and allowing coastal lawyers to deliver effective legal services at lower cost by staffing matters with lawyers from our offices in the Midwest that have lower billing rates.

In addition, we had researched with keen interest the legal technology literature on client extranets and the rise of litigation database Application Service Providers (ASPs). It would be important to offer clients the opportunity to access their litigation materials, to collaborate with clients, and to share litigation materials with the local counsel we work with across the country. For the sake of both efficiency and increasing the likelihood of actual use, we believed that the case management tool and the extranet should be one and the same as to not divert the firm's lawyers from their routine workflow.

Finally, our litigation technology decisions had to jive with the rest of the firm. We were then a mixed Novell/Microsoft shop but in the process of migrating to a complete Microsoft solution. We had SQL, Web, and security resources, and realized the potential benefits of an open architecture ' providing the ability to do limited customizations, particularly publishing data from one application in another.

Product Selection

Taking into account the firm's geographic dispersion, business needs, client service goals, and our technology platform including the likely need for external collaboration, we believed a Web-based solution sitting atop a SQL database was the most logical choice.

In the summer of 2002, there were only three “bring-it-home-in-the box” products of this type on the market. (Today, there would be three or more additional options, and all of the products have evolved.) We selected Ringtail Casebook by Ringtail Solutions for several reasons:

• Unified Web interface for all users: One competing product had a Web interface for some users and a fat client interface for others. While the fat client version certainly offered greater features, we valued unified training and support more greatly than the ability to put a fat client application in the hands of a few power users;
• Rich feature set to handle complex litigation: CaseBook had enough features to handle our most demanding cases, but enough controls and security levels to “turn off” features and functionality not essential to a given case team. Although one competing product had a very simple user interface (and was attractive for that reason), users would end up sacrificing features and flexibility in return. Staying true to our philosophy of standardizing technology across the firm, we knew that CaseBook could become our case management and repository standard platform, limiting the training of lawyers and legal assistants to one application rather than three or four, and simplifying the overall advanced planning process;
• The right “bells & whistles”: CaseBook's features seemed to be a good “fit” with the way our lawyers work. We valued the method of structuring data sets into levels, giving lawyers a navigable, “Windows Explorer” view of all case materials. We also wanted the ability to do in-house scanning of daily, low-volume materials such as pleadings and correspondence. Casebook allows uploading scanned, word-searchable PDFs ' something we routinely do for non-evidentiary materials.

Implementing CaseBook

Implementation required a Web server, a SQL server, IIS, and the storage space required to house case materials. We first ran the product in a test environment and then pushed it out to production servers where users could access the tool from the firm's intranet.

All servers are housed in the firm's St. Louis location, and we've experienced excellent performance across the WAN, particularly for standard, single-page .tif images. The system has been uncannily stable; we have had very few periods of down time, most of which have been attributable to hardware hiccups. The only item to install on local machines is Ringtail's image viewer, a tiny application. Ringtail issues periodic updates, and while we run those in our test environment before pushing them into production, we've never encountered a technical issue or needed to roll back.

We support the system with two litigation support analysts who perform data and image loading, production, export, data normalization and other tasks too “technical” for legal assistants. We have one technical resource we call on from time to time to assist with updates on the servers, deleting data for archived cases and other technical functions. A litigation support coordinator, as well as the analysts, advises lawyers and legal assistants on best practices, database design, and direct vendors on coding and EDD projects.

Firm-wide Adoption

As you might expect, lawyers (we're never first in line to learn a new technology tool) adopted the tool slowly. At Bryan Cave, adoption of Ringtail CaseBook has been driven by the need to collaborate with clients, co-counsel or among Bryan Cave offices as well as the requirement of housing more data than we could store on our local file servers when using the firm's previous fat client applications.

Only 2 years after we went live with the system, we have had roughly 100 cases and over 200 users on the system, including a number of external users. We have allowed controlled access to clients, co-counsel, and expert witnesses. We have used cross-office staffing to a greater degree, allowing us to apply industry/legal expertise more readily and to complete time-sensitive projects by contributing time from available lawyers around the firm. We have created many document productions, hosted scores of gigabytes of native electronic files for review and are now in the process of making our first production of native documents. We have performed one custom integration (pulling data from CompuLaw's Vision docketing system and putting it into the Casebook calendar), and are exploring others.

An additional CaseBook benefit is the capability to host internally electronic discovery projects by posting native files for review. Attorneys and legal assistants review native files in Casebook (using the Quick View Plus plug-in). Outside vendors convert selected, responsive files to .tif for later production. As a result, we can begin an EDD review quickly, avoiding charges for ASPs, massive .tif conversions and EDD project managers ' which saves the firm's clients considerable expense.

Next Generation Technology

While Ringtail Casebook has surprisingly few weak spots, improvements could be made with the Import/Export Manager, the searchability of production Bates numbers and the Advanced Full Text Search interface. The latter is added functionality that is being delivered in Ringtail Legal 2005, a new product from FTI Consulting that introduces some significant feature enhancements on the previous Ringtail CaseBook product, as well as underlying changes to improve speed, security and ease of administration.

In Summary

Ringtail Solutions Casebook fits beautifully with Bryan Cave's “One Firm” approach to handling client matters. Because Casebook is a Web-based case management system, we can apply legal talent from multiple Bryan Cave offices to a single client matter without duplication. The ability to share case information with clients and co-counsel has made Casebook an integral part of meeting client needs. Our case teams are now experiencing great efficiencies with native electronic file review and workflow processes we have designed for managing discovery, creating greater value for our clients.