Don’t Be Outgunned at Arbitration

Making the best decision on how to handle documents and exhibits in a document-intensive arbitration or trial is not easy.  Recently, one of our clients was involved in a two-week arbitration and, to save costs, the decision was made to manage the documents without the use of trial presentation software.  Shortly after the arbitration began, it became clear that this wasn’t the most effective method to access the documents, as counsel was unable to quickly focus the attention of the panel on the sentence or paragraph in question.  This situation was made worse by the fact that the other side had a paralegal who had been trained on and was using Sanction to manage their documents.

At the conclusion of the third day, a Thursday, counsel contacted us, lamenting that they were “being outgunned” by opposing counsel and needed the help of one of our experienced trial technicians.   Our trial technician met with the attorneys the next day, at which point the clients provided an overview of the case and a thumb drive of the 800 or so exhibits in PDF format.

The trial technician spent the weekend renaming, organizing, and importing the files into a TrialDirector database and also became familiar with the key documents.  By Monday morning at 9:15 am, we were ready to go and the trial technician quickly got in sync with the attorneys, easily pulling up documents, highlighting, zooming in, creating “tear-outs,” lines, and other such annotations on demand.  Particularly effective was pulling up a chart of names on one side and the document related to each name, one at a time, on the other, complete with tear-outs and highlights.

After five days of effective trial presentation, our clients were no longer feeling “outgunned.”