Litigators, Technology

Your Edge In Litigation Depends On How You Organize Your Case

Cases are won primarily by two factors 1) how smart your team is, and 2) how organized it is. You can’t really do much to control factor one, but factor two is entirely in your control.

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The bottom line is this: cases are won primarily by two factors 1) how smart your team is, and 2) how organized it is. You can’t really do much to control factor one, but factor two is entirely in your control.

In my world, the mass tort world, you typically have more information than you can possibly digest. It is common to have 60 depositions and over a million documents in a case. You carefully examine the documents to find who you want to depose, and then scramble to assemble exhibits for each deposition. The process requires meticulous organization. And that’s just the discovery phase. During the discovery phase, you might have anywhere from a few days to a few weeks between witnesses. In the trial phase, you might have just a lunch break if you’re lucky or a few minutes if you are not to prepare between witnesses. You have to be on the ball with your trial objections and you have to be ready with your impeachment evidence. The process from start to finish takes smarts and organization.

The same is true in single-plaintiff cases. A few years ago, I was in a personal injury trial for the defense. The plaintiff was a grandma in her 60s who was coming home from work when one of our client’s employees went too fast and drifted into oncoming traffic, hitting her head on. Our driver was in his own car because the company told him that he’s too dangerous to drive a company truck. We got the least deserved defense verdict ever. One of the key moments in the trial was when we were able to use an application for life insurance, which was made under penalty of perjury, to impeach the plaintiff on her claimed injuries. We were able to lead that grandma down a path and bait her with our impeachment exhibit because no one on her team even knew the document existed. We didn’t win because we deserved it, we won because we knew where things were and could get them faster than the other side. It happens all the time.

Last month I flew to New York to attend LegalTech with the intent to find and report on companies that can help our readers. This week, I want to talk about one of the companies that helps lawyers organize their cases.

How Opus 2 Magnum Helps Lawyers Stay Organized

Opus 2 Magnum is a cloud case management tool developed by the creator of LiveNote. Since it’s cloud based, it’s especially useful for multi-district litigation cases involving multiple law firms in different areas of the country, but its organizational features are helpful in single-firm cases as well.

Like Doc Review Software, Only for All Forms of Evidence

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In a nutshell, you upload your evidence into the cloud platform and then organize it with the built-in tools. Unlike doc review platforms, which mostly deal with organizing documents, Opus 2 Magnum accepts documents, deposition transcripts, and deposition videos. Once the evidence is all in one place, you can begin to organize it. You create tags for the issues in your case just like you would with document review software, but here you can use those tags in passages from deposition transcripts as well. You can create digital post-it notes for documents and depositions. You can also link documents to each other. So, instead of putting a note that reads, “This answer is not true. See Bates number Smith00003498,” you can just create a hyperlink to the document within Opus 2 Magnum and save your team the time of having to locate that document every time they come across that note. Upload discovery responses and link to inconsistent deposition answers or documents.

Opus 2 Magnum allows you to create deposition clips and export video segments to play in trial. You can create clips by copying and pasting a list of deposition page and line numbers to create clips in batches.

Another helpful feature is the ability to use internal notifications. Instead of exporting and e-mailing documents to the team, you can create a note for a document and tag team members, sending them an e-mail that there is a note or a document for their attention. This is especially important in cases with protective orders where control over rogue documents lingering in Outlook mailboxes of law firms across the country can be a problem.

As you organize and annotate your evidence, you can put it into digital witness binders or organize it by issue tag. You can export your data out of the cloud for use at trial either by single documents or with a batch export for offline access.

Here’s a quick video with some more information.

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Jeff Bennion is Of Counsel at Estey & Bomberger LLP, a plaintiffs’ law firm specializing in mass torts and catastrophic injuries. Although he serves on the Executive Committee for the State Bar of California’s Law Practice Management and Technology section, the thoughts and opinions in this column are his own and are not made on behalf of the State Bar of California. Follow him on Twitter here or on Facebook here, or contact him by e-mail at jeff@trial.technology.

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