War Room Advocate

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...

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 ...