Risk is the possibility of losing something of value. Values can be gained or lost when taking risk resulting from a given action or inaction, foreseen or unforeseen. Risk can also be defined as the intentional interaction with uncertainty. Uncertainty is a potential, unpredictable, and uncontrollable outcome; risk is a consequence of action taken in spite of uncertainty.
A lawyer or attorney is a person who practices law, as an advocate, attorney, attorney at law, barrister, barrister-at-law, bar-at-law, civil law notary, counsel, counselor, counsellor, counselor at law, solicitor, chartered legal executive, or public servant preparing, interpreting and applying law, but not as a paralegal or charter executive secretary. Working as a lawyer involves the practical application of abstract legal theories and knowledge to solve specific individualized problems, or to advance the interests of those who hire lawyers to perform legal services.
A legal case is a dispute between opposing parties resolved by a court, or by some equivalent legal process. A legal case may be either civil or criminal law. In each legal case there is an accuser and one or more defendants.
Over 90% of all cases settle prior to trial. Often an organization will spend significant time and money on a case only to find they want to settle for whatever reason. Legal discovery costs are usually the most burdensome financially to both plaintiff and defendant. Often, and during cases in the United States, an opposing party will strategize on how to make it as difficult as possible for you to comply with the discovery process, including time and cost to respond to discovery requests. Because of this, organizations have a continued need to conduct early case assessment to determine their risks and benefits of taking a case to trial without painful settlement discussions.
In law, a trial is a coming together of parties to a dispute, to present information in a tribunal, a formal setting with the authority to adjudicate claims or disputes. One form of tribunal is a court. The tribunal, which may occur before a judge, jury, or other designated trier of fact, aims to achieve a resolution to their dispute.
A plaintiff is the party who initiates a lawsuit before a court. By doing so, the plaintiff seeks a legal remedy; if this search is successful, the court will issue judgment in favor of the plaintiff and make the appropriate court order. "Plaintiff" is the term used in civil cases in most English-speaking jurisdictions, the notable exception being England and Wales, where a plaintiff has, since the introduction of the Civil Procedure Rules in 1999, been known as a "claimant", but that term also has other meanings. In criminal cases, the prosecutor brings the case against the defendant, but the key complaining party is often called the "complainant".
A defendant is a person accused of committing a crime in criminal prosecution or a person against whom some type of civil relief is being sought in a civil case.
Many service organizations, law firms, and corporations refer to early case assessment differently. Consultants hired by the corporation or law firm on a case manage cases on a risk basis. There also exist a number of software tools that assist in and help facilitate the process of early case assessment. Effective early case assessment might require the combination of professional expertise and software. This pairing, depending on the professional and tools used can provide various degrees of early case assessment review. Early case assessment, as a managed process, often requires customization to each case and the client involved.
The early case assessment lifecycle will typically include all of the following:
Information hosting for attorney and expert document review, commenting, redaction.
Produce documents to parties in the case.
Reuse information in future cases.
Early case assessment software is typically used by attorneys, corporate legal departments, risk managers, forensics teams, IT professionals and independent consultants to help them analyze unstructured electronically stored information.
The software approach to early case assessment typically includes the following:
Determine the source files to analyze.
Point the analysis tool to the files to be analyzed.
Set parameters for the assessment.
Allow the program to automatically scan and assess the data, which may be located on local hard drives, removable media, file servers, whole networks, etc.)
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Discovery, in the law of common law jurisdictions, is a pre-trial procedure in a lawsuit in which each party, through the law of civil procedure, can obtain evidence from the other party or parties by means of discovery devices such as a request for answers to interrogatories, request for production of documents, request for admissions and depositions. Discovery can be obtained from non-parties using subpoenas. When a discovery request is objected to, the requesting party may seek the assistance of the court by filing a motion to compel discovery.
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IT risk management is the application of risk management methods to information technology in order to manage IT risk, i.e.:
Information Discovery is a term used in the legal and corporate industry which refers to the steps involved in distilling a corporation’s data corpus down to the most pertinent evidence pertaining to a court-related matter or compliance directive. The major information discovery steps include: managing the entire data collection in a manner to identify all pertinent evidence associated with the matter, targeting that information for collection, processing and identification (culling) of relevant data, and processing for document hosting and legal document/information review.
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Catalyst Repository Systems is a privately held company based in Denver, Colorado, USA, which develops, hosts and supports cloud-based software for the management of electronic legal discovery. Founded in 2000, the company’s main product is Insight Discovery. Catalyst has offices and data centers throughout the United States, and an office and data center in Tokyo, Japan.
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The Sedona Canada Principles are a set of authoritative guidelines published by The Sedona Conference to aid members of the Canadian legal community involved in the identification, collection, preservation, review and production of electronically stored information (ESI). The principles were drafted by a small group of lawyers, judges and technologists called the Sedona Working Group 7 or Sedona Canada. Sedona Canada is an offshoot of The Sedona Conference which is an American “non-profit…research and educational institute dedicated to the advanced study of law and policy in the areas of antitrust law, complex litigation, and intellectual property rights.”
