The August Corporate Legal Times reports on ways to reduce litigation costs. Technology plays a big role and one of my favorite approaches – decision trees – is featured.
GCs Offer Strategies for Reining in Litigation Costs reports on a recent general counsel roundtable. The sub-title is “Decision Tress Play a Key Role in Settling Complex Cases.” My former colleague and now law professor David Post and I explained the basics of risk analysis and decision trees in a 1990 article (the concepts have not changed since then) and I recently wrote about software for doing decision trees.
A sidebar to the article lists “Controlling Costs in 10 Easy Steps” by FMC general counsel Jeff Carr. Two involve technology: (1)”Require that your law firms create a decision tree or other early case assessment within 90 days of retaining them.” (2)”Once you are in litigation, use an artificial intelligence engine instead of people to triage electronic documents for discovery relevance. Seek to reduce the documents people need to review to the important ones as opposed to using people to review documents to determine which are important.”
And two of Carr’s steps relate to knowledge management techniques: (1) “After it’s all said and done, do an ‘after action’ or a ‘lessons learned’ review.” (2) “Remember the whole process is circular… learn from the process to avoid it again.”