Blog

Over the past few months, we’ve been collecting litigation nightmares through our website, email, and in person at conferences and events. After hearing hundreds of your stories, we found these nightmares can be narrowed down to a few themes: More cost than it was worth Discovery wars and abuse Being “home-towned” Frivolous suit (“I can’t believe they filed this suit”) One party does not actually want to resolve anything No clear litigation goal (and strategy to achieve it) Without divulgingRead More

How do you know if you are caught in a litigation costs black hole? When I first entered the practice of law I worked in-house at Sega, the video game company. We were in a hyper growth phase and with that kind of growth comes litigation, all kinds of litigation, some legitimate, but most of it specious. During this time, our outside counsel bills blossomed, or more accurately, exploded, to the tune of over $1M per month. To me, thatRead More

Who decides the outcome of your dispute when you can’t resolve it yourself? The answer, as any good lawyer will tell you, is “it depends.” It depends on what dispute resolution method the parties choose to use and what kind of a dispute it is. Judge or Jury If you litigate thru trial in State or Federal Court, a judge or jury will decide your case. Usually, if there is a potentially strong emotional element to the case, at leastRead More

It would be great if arbitration were THE alternative answer to litigating in courts with over crowded dockets and ever shrinking budgets, but arbitration hasn’t turned out to be that kind of panacea over the last 40 years. I was stopped at a traffic light behind a vehicle with a license plate that said ARBATR8. Now, I haven’t thought about arbitration much, in years. In fact, I don’t think much about arbitration at all, but seeing that license plate gotRead More

Litigation can be expensive and one of the largest expenses of any litigation is finding information. Of those dollars devoted to discovery and investigation costs, producing electronically stored information (ESI) alone can comprise 60-80% of those costs. Drilling down into those costs and taking a closer look at what it costs to produce ESI, according to the Rand Institute for Civil Justice, reviewing these documents for relevancy and privilege comprises 73% of these production costs. A common industry benchmark forRead More

The Dispute Our latest Resolve involved a laboratory services contract that specified the payment of about $28,000 in penalties if the customer delayed the start date of the study. As is often the case, both sides believed they were in the right, actually had good reasons for believing it, and felt the other side was acting the scoundrel. The laboratory had reserved and purchased resources and materials specific to this study and so had lost the opportunity to do otherRead More