War Room Advocate

If your firm is going to trial, or perhaps you are hosting a document review, you need equipment. Of course, there are some firms that have LOTS of extra equipment sitting at the ready. I would guess that most firms don’t have a significant amount of inventory waiting in the wings. As an example, let’s assume that your firm is going to trial in the near future. Maybe you’ll have 15 people on your trial team. For the purpose of this illustration, I’ll suppose that you’ve already booked the war room space and have contracted with an internet services provider. What type of equipment might you need to have for this trial? Networking equipment – you need network switches to connect everyone, some type of device to provide network addresses for each host on the network (either a server or networking device such as a firewall that will serve up DHCP for your network), and Ethernet cables for computers and printers. Electrical – you’re going to need power strips to distribute to

As most of you who are reading my blog already know, the Eastern District of Texas is generally very busy, although it is likely that patent trials here are going to drop off quite a bit due to a recent SCOTUS  ruling. If you are scheduled for a trial in the Eastern District, work with someone who is based there and can provide resources for your trial team. Contact me and I can point you in a direction of a company that knows the area, can deliver equipment and has a lot of experience supporting trials. You might be working with local counsel, but they probably won’t have the equipment you need. Perhaps you will be working alone, but are coming to trial here from out of state. Even much larger firms can use a helping hand sometimes. Not every firm has the trial support staff to dedicate for the duration of a trial because their employees might be working on projects in the home office or unable to travel for an extended time frame. It could be your firm has simultaneous trials taki

I used to work for a network security provider, so maybe I think about security a little more than some people. I believe that it is so important to ensure that access to the war room is controlled as much as possible. I know that trial teams can’t have a security guard standing at the door all the time checking identification, but the team needs to be aware of keeping the space secure. From a physical security standpoint, it means that the last person to leave the workspace needs to pull the door closed and test it to make sure that it doesn’t open with a hard pull. Sometimes there will be a lot of people if you’re in a hotel, and their curiosity will get the best of them. It can look like a parade of people walking by and looking in to see what’s going on in there. It is really an interesting thing to the hotel guests to look at what they think of as a conference room and see a fully functioning war room. It’s like a train wreck that they can’t look away from. There is

Over the years, I’ve done so many trials. I would like to say I’ve done hundreds because sometimes it feels like it, but that wouldn’t be true! I’ll guess that I have supported some 50 to 70 trials in one capacity or another over the last several years. Of course those trials run the gamut from settling or being continued, to going the full length in court. With the trials that get settled, or even continued, the whole war room space still gets planned out and built. You have to build it because you can’t count on anything other than the fact that you have a court date and must plan to be ready to go. I can post about the prospect of “pencils down” in a subsequent post. What I’m writing about in this post are some quick thoughts about war rooms in general and what they turn out to be in real life. There seems to be a prevalent feeling with those that don’t go to trial that it is a vacation. People see that you leave the office and travel to (sometimes) interesting locals. Their thi

Firms that go to trial frequently know that there are a lot of puzzle pieces that come together to be successful at a trial. Obviously, the lawyers doing the lawyering are the most important part! Beyond that, there are a lot of other parts that have to come together to make everything go as well as possible. Staff – many firms have various staff members that they bring along and they are all important. Paralegals clearly have a critical role in organizing everything and ensuring that the trial team is prepared for their court date. Assistants (secretarial) can be the right-hand of attorneys and/or paralegals and also provide a very valuable service. Some firms bring IT and Office Services personnel along as well to help with all of the things that come up. Graphics – there are firms that have “in-house” graphics people and many that use consultants for this type of work. Many graphics people are proficient with programs like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, animation software an

Printers and copiers on just one side of room Sometimes it seems that this is all everyone cares about when you set up workspace for trial. Sure, people need to access the internet and get email, and they want a comfortable work area. There is something about printing at trial though, it starts right away and continues until that last person doesn’t need anything else so you can finally break down. I have made the joke at more than one trial that once people get there they will start to print “the library of congress.” It is a marvel how much printing goes on in earnest as soon as people sit down. This is one of the single greatest things you have to get right when you are planning for your group. You’ll need black and white printers, and color printer(s) as well as high speed copiers that can scan and hole-punch and staple and so forth. If you have to get rid of anything, lose the printers and keep the copiers. It’s not a bad idea to have both color and B&W copiers. Tru

This might be a short post, but it is worth mentioning. You have a trial coming up, so what kind of time schedule do you need to figure out? I’m hoping they aren’t telling you about how you need to set up a war room just a couple of weeks before they want to sit down and start working there. That sounds to me like a trial team that isn’t going to have a whole lot of services set up in an optimized way. You might get lucky and have some bandwidth. Or not. I say you should start getting information about the trial and the team around 4 months or more before trial is set to go. Honestly, with some communication going on, you could get clued in much earlier than that. 4 months is a good time-frame though. You guys are going to have to figure out where you’ll be staying, where the war room is going to be, and how you are going to provide services such as internet access. I have had experience in the past with having to use a phone company to deliver some type of internet service to

For this post I’m going to assume that we have a team of 10 to 15 or more people. It doesn’t matter if it’s 40 really, you just have to scale some things for simultaneous use. This list doesn’t really count for a small team of a handful of people. Once again, a group like that can work pretty much out of hotel rooms with a couple of small printers. I’ll work up a post in the near future about small teams and what they should consider bringing with them. For this one, I’m talking about having a team of attorneys, paralegals, assistants, experts, graphics, hot seat person and maybe consultants. You don’t have to have all of those groups at trial, but on large cases it wouldn’t be unusual to find those and more. Let’s get down to it, shall we? You know you’re going to need good bandwidth. Refer to some of my earlier posts where I talked about working to get those services. So, let’s assume you have good internet access. You have to build a network for your team, so that’s as good a

There are times when setting up in the hotel for your war room space just won’t work out. It could be that they have already booked up all of their conference rooms or they can’t provide any bandwidth. Another possibility is that the hotel is just too far from the court and your team wants to work closer in proximity. A whole new adventure awaits! Time to look for some space. I have been down this rabbit hole a few times. Getting some space you can work with could require persistence and patience. On the other hand, you might just stumble across the perfect setup right out of the gate. There might be a company that has set up workspace and contracts with law firms for blocks of time, and this might be just what you need. If you find something like this, you may discover that they already have a network set up, facilities for all of your equipment and space for the team to eat. If you don’t come across something like that, you’ll be looking for space to rent on a short term basis.

I’ve saved the best for last in this little series on getting internet access in the hotel. In the post titled Hunker Down, I talked about how you might have to just live with a situation where you don’t have any alternatives. Following that, Mix it Up was about having to make the decision to go somewhere else if the hotel just doesn’t want to work with you. In this post, I want to talk about the happy circumstance you will sometimes find yourself in where everything you need is already in place. It does happen. Especially in areas that have State or Federal Courts close by, there are likely to be hotels that have already invented the wheel. Maybe someone like me has been there before and laid the groundwork to get extra bandwidth in and all you have to do is pay to get it turned on. Maybe they have a lot of bandwidth already there and an IT group that can VLAN a portion of it off for you. When I talk with a hotel and they are very matter-of-fact about it and indicate that they

I believe this situation doesn’t happen very often, but I have been in this position before so it is worth mentioning. You have been told you will be staying at a certain hotel, and when you start a dialogue with them about getting internet access set up you figure out pretty fast that they don’t really want to work with you. No, they don’t have more bandwidth. No, they won’t let you bring in outside access. No, you can’t have access to their cable infrastructure. You’re lucky they are letting you stay there, don’t you know? Guess what? It’s time to have a real “heart to heart” talk with the people that picked this as your home away from home. If it’s the only game in town, then refer back to my earlier post here . It is difficult to set up a really functional war room if you just have to hunker down. If this hotel is NOT the only game in town, then you need to find a new home. Seriously. I can promise you that there are other hotels that would be thrilled to have a contra

Continuing this series on different scenarios that might play out with the hotel, I have to address the unfortunate circumstance that is a real possibility. I have (and the trial team I was working with) had to suffer with this before and I can tell you that it will motivate you to ensure that it doesn’t ever happen again. What I’m talking about is having to work in a place that doesn’t have enough bandwidth, and you can’t get any access from anywhere else. It makes me shudder just to think about how many ways this can be a bad thing. Let me explain some of the ways this is so undesirable. You’re sharing the hotels internet access with everyone staying there. You don’t know who any of these people are, to be honest. There could be a really good hacker type, or even more than one, on the same network as you. You’ll be competing with guests for the bandwidth too. In hotels, evenings are just awful regarding internet speed because everyone is getting logged on so they can video c

In my last post here , I was listing some of the ways that things can go if you have to build your war room in a hotel. I want to take some time and talk about the first two in that list. Specifically, I am going to write about how to work through some of the issues you’ll face when you are tasked with getting things set up in a place that has never done this before, or not on the scale you need. Now is the time you’re going to have to be like a certain cat and open your bag of tricks. This is especially the time to put your soft skills to work because the next period of time will be about making connections with people and negotiating to create a win/win situation. It isn’t as daunting as it may seem, you just have to work through your list of things that have to get done and make those connections. Better start now! What kind of problems do you have to solve? If the hotel doesn’t have the bandwidth for your team, you have to come to some type of agreement on how you can bri

This very topic might be one of the most important issues you have to work out. Many people will look at the final tally of posts on this series of blog posts, search for this particular topic, and decide this is the only one they need to read. I’ve already made a short list of maybe 20 to 30 different topics I can post about, but maybe this really IS the only one you need. Read on. You’ve been tasked with building a war room and people are going to show up. For this post I’m specifically talking about working out of a hotel. These are your marching orders…..you have to build a war room and it’s going to be in a hotel and you have to be up and running by such-and-such date. You have to figure out, starting right now, about how you are going to provide internet access for your team. Getting internet access at the hotel is perhaps one of the trickiest things to do. It doesn’t have to be, but it can . Most of the time, your people talk with their people and somewhere during the p

Three words. Location, Location & Location So you found out it’s time to set up another (or maybe your first) war room. Now your team will have to have to figure out where you are going to work for the duration of the trial. Maybe you have to figure that out by yourself, or possibly another person will be deciding along with you. Another possibility is that someone else simply says, “location X is where we are going to set up the war room, now make it happen.” There are different ideas about where that work space should be. Over the last few years, most of the attorneys I’ve worked with have said they want the war room to be in the Hotel they’re staying in. There is a certain comfort factor with being able to work and also have your living quarters in close proximity. There can be some technical advantages as well which I can talk about in another post on the subject of working with Hotels. Another positive aspect to working in the Hotel is it eliminates having to travel

Next up in my series on topics related to the war room…..getting the ball rolling. Let me start out by saying that every organization is different. It seems obvious, but different firms are going to have variances in the way they approach trial. For instance, some firms will have their lead paralegal on the matter do the planning as far as where the trial team will be staying, where the work-space will be and booking other things such as Hotel rooms and travel arrangements. Another firm may have an attorney in charge of those types of decisions and yet others may depend on secretaries or legal assistants to do that type of planning. It could be there is a litigation practice group that handles it. Whatever the case, when you find out that there is a trial coming and you’ll need to start planning a war room, it is very desirable to be brought in on the planning stage as early as possible for a couple of reasons. Nobody likes a surprise when it comes to something like this, and

What exactly is a war room? I would venture to guess that just about anyone interested enough in this blog to be reading it already knows what a war room is. For everyone else, it's basically a place where a business can work and plan to accomplish an important task. For the purpose of War Room Advocate, I will be specifically addressing the war room used by attorneys to prepare for a hearing or trial. There are countless trials scheduled at any given time all over the United States (and other international courts as well) and some of those cases can have large trial teams working on both sides of the trial. When a trial team is getting ready for that important court date, they will have to find a place to work if the trial is not near their office. As an example, say a firm has their office in Denver but they have a trial scheduled in Wilmington, Delaware two months from now. This poses a major problem for that firm because they probably can't just show up with a coup

Attorneys try cases all the time in places that are far away from the comfort of their home office. If there are more than a handful of people associated with the trial team, then there is usually a need to build out and use a War Room. With many years of creating war rooms that work,  I have developed some insights that might help others. I'll be blogging about different topics related to supporting trial teams, from logistical considerations to trial technology and specifically how to have a functional war room. Full disclosure - I am NOT an attorney and I am not giving legal advice in any way. What I AM is an IT professional that has worked in the legal industry for many years and have developed specific expertise in this area. I do work on case management and deal with documents and video for display in court, and I sit in the hot seat. I love working with trial teams and presenting their documents in court! It is my hope that I might be able to pass on some knowledge that o