Reducing Costs When Running Multiple Matters – We Didn’t Think This Was Achievable!

STUDY

A corporate entity was facing action on multiple fronts: several civil litigations and a regulatory investigation. The actions shared a core evidentiary base but each action required a distinct review approach and access to additional discrete evidence collections. The client had been using an alternative software environment but realised that the products’ approach, a single case/single collection paradigm, would require multiple handing of materials in discrete cases at an unacceptable cost, compromising functionality and adding an administrative burden. They looked further afield and selected Delium for its patented approach to managing multiple matters.

Delium’s Common Evidence Framework was expressly developed to meet the challenges of multi-purpose collections and could provide a highly streamlined solution to meet the client’s challenge. The framework maintains a single collection of Common evidence and its metadata with separate Satellite databases tailored for each unique action.

For this client, a single Common case and multiple Satellite cases were set up – four for the civil litigation team and one for the regulatory investigation team. A litigation support team managed all processing, importing and objective coding of the evidence in the Common evidence case.

Only a single copy of each item of evidence was stored, significantly reducing the hosting costs anticipated by the alternate software environment. A legal team undertook a first pass review of the evidence in the Common case, tagging each item to indicate which action (Satellite Case) it was relevant to and coding any choices that might be consistent across all actions, such as a claim for privilege. An item of evidence could be tagged to all Satellites, a single Satellite or a selection of Satellites.

This tagging action automatically “pushed” the files and relevant metadata out to the appropriate Satellite cases where the evidence could then be reviewed further and analysed subject to the requirements of the individual action. Each Satellite case was configured with a tailored user interface, fields and analytical functionality to meet the different needs of the various actions. Legally focused work within one Satellite case had no bearing on the work in the other Satellite cases.

Using Delium’s Common Evidence Framework cut the estimated budget for administrative effort and hosting costs for the multiple matters by over 80%. The data collection and importing processes were streamlined and focused on a single case, saving time and ensuring coding consistency. Managing a single evidence repository minimised risk and enhanced security.

If an objective coding error was identified, such as an incorrect date, the error could be corrected once in the Common Case and the date field in all Satellite cases would be immediately updated with the correct information. Delium delivered cost and quality efficiency without any compromise to the functionality required to meet the distinct needs of the separate actions.

The client’s CIOs noted that “the greatest benefit in using Delium for these related actions was that we didn’t have to sacrifice cost for functionality or vice versa. We could save money on the cost of the common collection but still have absolute flexibility in managing the separate actions. Before we used Delium we really didn’t think this was achievable.”

Why people love Delium

We were presented with 10 folders, the whole case, a little later we were looking at millions – with Delium this wasn’t a problem.

We needed a litigation support environment that would capitalise on our specialist capabilities and perform under very taxing circumstances. Delium delivered what we needed!

Using Delium significantly reduced our clients cost of running the proceedings because most of the time we could work from offices in our home cities rather than travelling to work together.