Model for Litigation Matters

[Craig]

I work for an accounting/economic analysis firm that specializes in
litigation consulting. We are hired by lawyers to help quantify damages in
civil law suits. Our directors (senior officers) will testify in a court of
law in support of our damage calculations, and also rebut the calculations
offered from the opposing side.

I have been asked by many seniors in my firm if I could recommend software
that would help manage the document flow, project hours, progress to date,
assignment of tasks, etc. for a given matter. A typical matter involves two
entities involved in a legal dispute, with my company being retained by
either one (plaintiff or defendant). Also involved are a tremendous amount
of analyses - summarizing depositions, research analyses of relevant markets
and industries, analyses of financial documents, etc. A matter will usually
have a managing director, a senior manager, along with junior analysts. The
above tasks are usually assigned to analysts.

The problems encountered are typical for any project: Which analyst is
doing what task? When did they start? What is their progress? What
documents have been reviewed? By whom? What summaries/reports/conclusions
have been generated?

As you can imagine, staff may be assigned to more than one matter. Also,
work on a particular matter may suddenly cease and remain dormant for an
extended period of time, and then resume again. It would be helpful for
everyone involved to be able to pick up where they left off, know at glance
what analyses have been completed, and very important - be able to retrieve
all of the results/conclusions or vital data up to that point.

The answer may simply be to develop an Access database. I understand that
Project is quite complex and is capable of very sophisticated project
management and scheduling. But I was wondering if Project would be useful
for litigation type matters such as this.

Any thoughts or suggestions for other software that you may be aware of
would be greatly appreciated, too.

Thanks for any and all help.

 

[Haris Rashid]

hi Craig,
While MS Project and Project Office offer advanced Enterprise Project
Management, you can still put MS project to a simple use to track WHO does
WHAT and WHEN. This will be your Work Breakdown Structure and you can track
the actual hours applied to a task along with the status (% completion) of
each task. However for the actual analysis and documents that have been
produced, you will need advanced features of Project Office and Share Point
Team Services. It is however possible within MS Project to provide hyperlinks
to documents on computer hard-disk or over the network.

You might find the information at following link useful:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/project/prodinfo/standard/overview.mspx

A demo is also available at:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/project/prodinfo/epm/demo.mspx


Kind regards,

 

[Craig]

Haris:

Thank you for the insights and links.