Leading commercial law firm Taylor Wessing used LitiGate at the disclosure phase of a piece of high profile litigation. The tasks at hand were the exploration and interrogation of case data to inform the disclosure exercise and preparation of an interim application on behalf of the Defendant.
Exploration of evidence, to gain a clear understanding of “who did what and when”, requires a detailed analysis of the documents. That process can be lengthy and laborious, and litigators must feel secure that no stone has been left unturned. Only when we can see and navigate the whole story can we make informed strategic moves.
One specific challenge of the case was that key players were referred to in many different ways within the case documents; various permutations or abbreviations of a company’s name meant it was difficult to know that all variations had been “caught”.
The LitiGate Actors tool allowed the team to see all aliases, and mentions, of relevant players, as well as the appropriate links between actors. So they knew that they weren’t missing anything. Certain of the aliases for key players’ names were unforeseen by the team (abbreviations and the like), and so would likely have been overlooked had this work been carried out manually.
The LitiGate Chronologies tool facilitates instant identification and extraction of key data points (down to the sentence level) from across the case. Deploying the Actors and Chronologies tools in tandem meant that it was quick and easy for the team to pinpoint “who said what, and when”, with the appropriate source document context.
With LitiGate, time spent on knowledge elicitation is reduced significantly as all case documents become searchable automatically. The LitiGate SmartSearch tool was invaluable here, enabling the team to search the full extent of the dataset, in one hit, and quickly “zoom in” on the specific information sought. LitiGate – uniquely – classifies “events” down to the granular level of sentences or phrases from within documents. This meant that users could easily drill down to all mentions of an item/event, filtered by both date range and source document type, to work with maximum precision.
The team were able to save what they estimated would have been “hours and hours of trawling” by employing LitiGate to identify and extract the relevant information at, quite literally, the touch of a few buttons.
Taylor Wessing is a leading international law firm with 28 offices internationally, and an official partner of LitiGate. Taylor Wessing and LitiGate have been working closely since 2018, and the firm has played a key role in shaping and leading the next generation of litigation solutions.
Read more about our partnership here