Employing advanced project management techniques, the Ryley Carlock  team has helped law firms and corporations reshape the way they approach the litigation process.  As a result, jobs meant for the American workforce continue to be performed right here at home. 

"Applying fundamental principles of project management to the legal industry and particularly the e-discovery process, has helped us perform traditional ‘off-shore' activities such as document review and manual document coding in an efficient, affordable and accurate manner."  Said Matthew T. Clarke, Shareholder and co founder of the firm's Document Control Group. "The key has been good project management," Clarke said.  "We can compete on quality, efficiency and value, and provide very smart services using terrific talent right here in Grand Rapids, Michigan or in our facility in Phoenix, Arizona.

Clarke will join with legal Project Management Thought Leader Steven B. Levy  of Lexician, in hosting an invitation-only private dinner at Legal Tech, New York, to discuss advanced project management and how employing such precepts is saving companies significant revenue.

"We put Steven's principles into practice with great results for our clients," said Clarke.  For the past 7 years, the Document Control Group has worked hand in hand with some of the top litigation teams in the country to provide the informational processing piece of litigation including the review of hundreds of millions of pages of information. With its extremely competitive hourly rates, the DCG has provided greater cost control in litigation, and particularly the e-discovery process.

Case in Point:

Recently a Ryley Carlock Document Control Group (DCG) client, a publicly-traded Fortune 100 technology company was faced with multi-million dollar breach of contract lawsuit. The firm, retained one of the top litigation firms in the U.S. as its defense counsel. The firm's rates ranged from $350 to $700 an hour for attorneys and more than $150an hour for paralegals, while the DCG's hourly rates were a fraction of that.  After processing and culling, the client was faced with a data set of just over 300,000 documents that required substantive review.  Because of the delicate nature of the client's business, every document required an eyes on review for not only responsiveness, but privilege and other delicate business and proprietary information.

DCG Leadership - spearheading the effort to bring order to the e-discovery process:

• DCG discovery counsel took ownership of the process of identifying custodians of and sources of information, issuing preservation holds, collecting, processing, hosting, reviewing and producing relevant ESI as part of the discovery process; allowing the litigation team to do what it does best - focus on developing a winning litigation strategy.
  
• DCG project managers worked with the Litigation Team to implement project management principles into the e-discovery process: scoping the project; preparing a realistic budget; predicting time requirements; and identifying necessary resources.
  
• DCG discovery counsel and project managers worked with the technology team to create defensible collection processes to help eliminate the need to collect and process redundant information.
  
• DCG discovery counsel and project managers worked with the technology team and Litigation Team to create and validate various forms of key word and other types of filters to dramatically reduce the size of the data population for review. Where the cost of processing, hosting and reviewing a single document can be more than a dollar, eliminating tens of thousands of documents through filtering resulted in dramatic cost savings to the client. Using DCG attorneys at DCG rates simply propelled the cost savings.
  
• DCG discovery counsel and project managers worked with the technology team to utilize clustering and other technology to help expedite the review process and dramatically reduce overall review time.
  
• DCG discovery counsel and project managers helped develop a substantive issue tag structure that created the most efficiency for the Litigation Team while reducing redundancies and speed loss during issue coding.
  
• DCG leadership ran the e-discovery process from start to finish as the overall project manager and single point of contact for decisions related to collection, processing, hosting, review and production, delivering the right product as predicted, on time, and on budget.

DCG Review team -reducing the cost of document review

• DCG as the single point of contact, implemented Smart Review - a process for achieving a single pass total review where a single set of attorneys address issues of responsiveness / relevance / privilege and redaction / and issue coding in a single pass, eliminating the need for "multi-level" review. (Multi-level review generally involves a first pass, broad review of documents for responsiveness, generally performed by a staffing agency or offshore, followed by a second and sometimes third review performed by more senior and experienced legal professionals - paralegals, associates and partners from the litigation firm - for actual relevance, responsiveness, privilege, and ultimate issue coding. Due in great part to redundancy of effort, multi-level reviews can increase client costs in litigation by as much as 50 percent vs. single level reviews.)
  
• DCG project managers assembled the project training manual to educate review team of 15 attorneys. DCG attorneys were then trained on substantive issues by the Litigation Team, becoming the Litigation Team's "right hand" on document management and other e-discovery related issues.
  
• DCG attorneys reviewed, coded, privileged, redacted and otherwise completed the review of the entire document set on time and well within budget. The team utilized good project management, early case assessment, and clustering technology to organize and expedite the review.
  
• During the review DCG attorneys met on an ongoing basis with the Litigation Team to comment on and help develop case strategies (and adjust theories regarding claims and defenses) based upon information found in documents.
  
• §DCG review team completed the review in 30 days at a total review cost of less than $250,000. This same review was expected to cost more than a half million dollars utilizing a multi-level two-tiered approach with an off-shore component and law firm oversight, and more than a million dollars if performed by the law firm itself.

DCG Attorneys - unbundling traditional litigation support services to further reduce cost:

The Litigation Team continued to leverage the DCG attorneys' knowledge of the case and familiarity with documents by transferring many tasks traditionally performed by law firm paralegals, associates and partners (at law firm rates) to the DCG team; resulting in additional efficiency and cost reduction.

• DCG team prepared a privilege log of more than 1,200 documents.
  
• DCG team was asked to perform fact research (searching through the entire document set) to find documents to support counter-claims that the Litigation Team suspected could be asserted, but did not yet have documents to support. Because of the DCG team's familiarity with the documents and custodians, and substantive familiarity with the case, it was able to perform this research and identify the needed documents in a fraction of the time (and at a fraction of the cost) that it would have taken the Litigation Team.
  
• DCG team prepared binders of "key" documents for corporate counsel and the Litigation Team to use to further evaluate the merits of the case. This proved helpful in allowing them to make strategic decisions about individual claims and defenses before proceeding to trial.
  
• DCG team prepared individual witness binders (containing documents and summaries of documents deemed relevant to that witness) to be used in preparation for taking depositions.
  
• DCG participated in several "strategy sessions" with the Litigation Team- sitting down with the litigation team to discuss claims and defenses and the DCG attorneys' perception of those claims and defenses based upon information found in documents reviewed to date.

"There has been, over the past several years, a seismic shift in the way corporations and law firms approach litigation information management," said Bill McManus, co-founder of the DCG. "The implementation of project management into the legal arena is changing the face of litigation and certainly e-discovery, and we are excited to be a part of it."