War Room Advocate

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