Case Study 1: NDA Reviews for International Bank
The in-house legal team of the UK branch of a global bank regularly receives over 30 counterparty NDAs to review and agree each month. Each NDA needs to be turned quickly to allow deal teams to progress, with the result that the lawyers are constantly diverted from higher value (and more rewarding) tasks.
A solution involving external firm trainees provided as a value-added services was unsuccessful. The trainees did not have the confidence to limit changes to those that were strictly necessary, resulting in the in-house lawyers having to review and amend each mark-up.
The bank tested the market and discovered significant disparities in pricing for NDA review services. Our proposal was extremely competitive on price with, for an equivalent or superior level of resource and service to our rivals and we were selected for the work.
Case Study 2: eDisclosure Review: 100K Docs in Three Weeks
A City firm instructed us on the review of 100,000 documents for relevance and privilege in a competition follow-on claim arising out of a cartel. The challenge was that due to various delays with the client, the court deadline left us with only three weeks to complete the review. Three weeks at the start of the first Covid lockdown and the Easter bank holiday weekend.
We assembled a team of 20 experienced reviewers, working remotely using secure collaboration systems and processes, including Teams and Outlook hosted on Amazon Works Spaces virtual machines with two factor authentication.
Our legal project manager was a litigator with over 15 years’ post qualification experience, a person who had performed end to end disclosure processes as the lead associate in private practice. Our PM worked with the instructing lawyers in the preparation of the instructions and the initial briefing meeting with the review team. Our PM took care of every aspect of assembling and managing the review team, saving the instructing lawyers vital hours to deploy on other aspects of the matter.
