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You need equipment

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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
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The Eastern District of Texas

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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
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Security is a BIG DEAL

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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
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Make do

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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
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Creating partnerships for success

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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
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Can I print yet?

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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
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Timing is everything

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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
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