Posts Tagged ‘litigation workflow’

Litigation Work

litigation work

Work As A Paralegal For Good Pay

You can earn good money as a paralegal. It is a challenging environment but you will make a good income once you become certified to work as a paralegal and get some good experience. You have to attend college and get at the minimum a two year associates degree.

You will be taking primarily legal based classes. You will have to learn basic legal research and how to brief a law case. The course will also have classes in basic law office management. You will have to have basic computer skills like you would need in an office job. But you will also have to know how to do legal research with the computer.

Years ago legal research was done at the library. Today it is mostly done online. But you need to do that research quickly and efficiently. This is a good career but you will not make a lot of money right away. You need to work your way up the pay scale.

Get to work in any law office you can when you are taking classes. Even if you merely answer the phone you still need to be in the law office environment to start getting experience. Even when you do work as a paralegal you will only make a little more than minimum wage. But you will move up quickly with more experience.

The idea is to make yourself indispensable to the lawyer you are working for. This will lead to your value. This will lead to you charging more for your services. Attorneys rely on their paralegals to do all the work they do not have the time to do.

You can earn more money if you specialize in areas of law. This is what lawyers do. So they need specialist to help them run their office. There is more money in litigation work for the paralegal but there is also more expectations and more pressure. This is for you if you can handle the stress.

You will be in charge for most of the trial preparation. You will be blamed if something goes wrong but you will be praised if it all goes right. The government might also be a place to find work. But the larger the city the more competition there is for these jobs. But if you have the right experience and the right contacts you might be able to land one of these government positions.

You have to know going in that lawyers are not easy to work for. Some have big egos and look down on people who work for them. But you might work for one that respects you a great deal for the work you do. The better you do your job the more likely you will command respect. You might be blamed even if you did everything right. This is just part of the job. But if you can learn to deal with this type of work environment then this might be the job for you. Contact your local education center for more information.

How do I market our environmental consulting firm, especially with respect to our litigation support?

Our litigation support is well established and our expert witness is a big name in the industry. However, our litigation services travel by word of mouth. We need to actively market these services to find work to fill in the gaps between large cases and expatriate word of mouth. We also offer other services that we need to push. How do we get the word out and bring in steady business?

I don’t know your company, but if you want something cheap and use the Internet, then visit networking sites (linkedin, and many many more)

But in general terms, try to get closer to the people you want to reach (study them to get to know them better). If you have a decent budget you need less creativity, otherwise you need lots of research and work. It can be fun!

Antares announces the opening of the 2010 work on the Rio Grande Cu-Au-Ag Project, Argentina Waterdown, ONTARIO – (Marketwire – August 17, 2010) – Antares Minerals Inc. ("Antares") (TSX VENTURE: ANM), together with its joint venture partner, Pacha Mama Resources ("Pacha Mama", PMA.TSX-V) is pleased to announce the inauguration of the 2010 work program, known on the Rio Grande Project, a large Cu-Au-Ag porphyry system with affinities in Salta Province, northwest Argentina. The 2010 …

Litigation Workflow

litigation workflow

Ten Things You Should Know About Document Discovery

In the U.S., document discovery in litigation has its own practices. Efficient document discovery can save large sums of litigation costs. Even in other countries, efficient document “discovery” can substantially enhance the chances of success in lawsuits. If you cannot locate critical documents that support your arguments, you could lose genuine claims in a court of law.

1. Document discovery means retrieving and producing documents that substantiate your claims, whether in the context of a lawsuit or a compliance audit. In today’s context, over 90 per cent of discoveries are electronic discoveries, i.e. discovering documents stored in an electronic form.

2. If electronic document management systems are good, document discovery is far easier than the physical discovery of paper documents from the mass of papers, files and filing cabinets. However, proving the authenticity of electronic documents can face some special problems.

3. Just opening an electronic document can change the metadata associated with the document, with the user not even being aware that it has changed. Metadata can sometimes prove critical for supporting the claim being made. The substantial content of electronic documents is also quite easy to change, making them suspect as authentic evidence.

4. The metadata attached to electronic documents, such as the automatically recorded “date of modification” and the person who created it can help prove specific points. Electronic documents are often required in their “native file” state to access such metadata.

5. Electronic repositories are often cleared automatically of old files to make space for new documents. Volumes of electronic documents such as e-mails and saved chat messages can mount to huge quantities if such periodic clearing is not done. This can sometimes mean losing valuable documents that substantiate legal claims.

6. Regulations like Sarbanes Oxley Act have made it a serious offence to destroy electronic records once litigation has commenced, or even if one is suspected. A “legal hold” is placed on all documents, including e-mails, once such an event occurs. The inability to produce all relevant documents can also lead to adverse judgments against the defaulter.

7. Producing electronic documents in their native format is not always required. Instead, they can be printed out or converted into such formats as a PDF document before being produced. It is acceptability of the document to the litigants that is important. For example, converting a computational spreadsheet into PDF can lose all the computational details, and might affect the document’s value as evidence.

8. Electronic documents can exist in several versions and copies, possibly stored in different places such as local workstation computers, network servers, laptops and even home computers of employees. The document management system has to exercise tight control in such a situation to ensure that the legal admissibility of the documents is not affected.

9. Document management systems restrict access to documents, make unauthorized changes difficult, maintain audit trails of all actions done on each document and exercise strict version control that authenticity of electronic documents is preserved.

10. Where documents exist only in backup or archive media that are not on-line, their discovery can prove expensive and burdensome. In such cases, the parties might agree on sharing the costs of discovery if the documents are classified as “inaccessible” by law.

Electronic discovery, while theoretically easier, faces several problems that affect their acceptability and special training might be required to educate staff about relevant issues. There are resources like EDRM that can help with electronic discovery issues.

the business of law in a litigation and business representation firm?

For a busy well established litigation and business law representation firm that is in change, can anyone enlighten me as to a marco perspective of the model for the business functions of practicing law? specifically for the case where a partner has retired, another partner is assuming the lead of the firm, and while busy, the firm, in nearly every aspect, is sorely in need of modernization with regard to the operating procedures. The best way to move the work from the front door…to the file closing: the workflow through the firm, the books, the recording, the management…. basically the system flow structure. what standard operating procedures should be implemented? Looking to transition technologies for practice management, time and billing/ firm accounting. The software suite aspects I understand, What is the biz model / office operating processes; day2day,records;to manage the office and the business of this business. Can anyone show a crash course in firm accounting and SOP’s?

You have a complex problem. To answer I am going to assume that you are the new managing partner.
Don’t expect to be an expert in all things.
Find through executive search firm or referral an office manager who can move the firm out of the 19th century. There are a series of steps to implement the process.
The most important advice that I can give you is that your paper system must work before you convert to a computer based system (work flow). Map it out and decide if that is the best method. If it doesn’t work now it will be a bigger mess when you convert.
There are numerous software packages available for a legal firms. Let your new office manager do the research and make the recommendation to you. After all they have to live with it day to day. The software companies will give the all the information you will ever want to know on the work or system flow. After all that is the basis of their software package and expertise.
Do you really want to be an accountant? Talk to your CPA firm and get their recommendation. Remember, the current CPA firm may still be in the 19th century too.

This is not something to decide on price it is your lively hood on the line. Do it right the first time. If you try to do it all you will no longer be producing income and you will become overhead.

DeepDive start Escout ™ Data Loss Prevention Platform to bring the endpoint system without the need for software … DeepDive Technologies Inc., an Arizona-based Information risk management solutions, today unveiled its patent-pending automation Escout ™ platform.