Litigation War Room

By -
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 couple of file folders and have everything they need for the trial. The length of time for the trial will be decided by the Judge, and some of these cases can be very complicated. It is not uncommon for a matter to encompass hundreds of thousands, if not millions of documents. There are likely to be attorneys, paralegals, legal assistants and other possible staff. In addition, there can be consultants, experts, or co-counsel.

 Most firms will want to get to town and get started working full-time in "trial mode" several days before the actual trial begins. This is where the group settles in. What they need is a war room that will meet their needs.

 So, back to the question of what exactly is a war room. Fundamentally it's a private space to work and prepare. Naturally, there is a lot more to it than that. It needs to meet the technical requirements that the firm will have during the course of the trial. Internet access is a key for any number of reasons including email, research, access to data and so forth. Getting internet access can be tricky and I'll devote a whole article just to that topic in a subsequent post. Printing, copying and scanning are extremely important. High speed and capacity is the idea here. Having enough space for "breakout" rooms, run-through sessions with the graphics people or the "hot seat" and simply an area to eat are all going to be necessary. There will be a need for a place for each person to plug in their computer and work. And speaking of plugging in, electrical capacity can be the problem that kills the war room.

 This isn't meant to be an exhaustive list, just getting the ball rolling so I can address different aspects of what it takes to make all of this come together. Stay tuned!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Make do

By -
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
Read more

The Eastern District of Texas

By -
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
Read more

You need equipment

By -
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
Read more