by Ken Lopez Founder & CEO A2L Consulting
Ryan H. Flax (Former) Managing Director, Litigation Consulting A2L Consulting
Forty-five states may have mandatory continuing legal education (CLE) requirements for attorneys – but all litigators and litigation support staff, wherever they are located, have a duty to stay informed and maintain their skills. Whether you are a first chair litigator or a litigation paralegal, given the pace of change in trial technology and trial strategy, it can be a challenge just to keep up with the latest trends.
Ryan H. Flax, (Former) Managing Director, Litigation Consulting
Most people, when they think of trial graphics, focus on exhibits to be used at trial. But graphics can also be used in motions and briefs presented to judges, even if jurors will never see them. After all, if you are using graphics to make your argument or tell your story at trial, why not use them at an earlier stage to make your argument convincingly in your brief?
Electronic briefs (e-Briefs) made their first appearance on the legal stage in the 1990s, but today’s e-briefs are far ahead of their predecessors in terms of technology and usability. E-briefs are electronic versions of ordinary paper-based court filings. But instead of providing lengthy, thick and repetitive appendices and materials at the end of the brief, a lawyer filing an e-brief simply inserts hyperlinks to attachments from the main document. This has many advantages, and surely at least one of these advantages changes everything you ever knew about ebriefs.
WASHINGTON, DC — Animators at Law, a leading national provider of litigation support services, announces that it has produced what it believes to be a record-setting series of e-briefs (also called electronic briefs). The firm reports that in its latest e-brief project, it created over 60,000 hyperlinks in over 4,000 pages of court briefs referencing 5,000 additional documents in under three weeks of work. Animators believes this sets a record for the most complex ebrief created in the shortest amount of time for a federal court filing. E-briefs, or electronic briefs, are electronic versions of traditional court filings (e.g. motions, briefs, complaints, etc.) where cited documents (i.e. letters, cases, exhibits, etc.) are hyperlinked from the main filed document instead of being provided in paper form. Filed on a DVD or USB flash drive, e-briefs allow a judge and opposing counsel to review thousands of pages of information much more quickly than in paper form. Since tens or hundreds of thousands of pages are not printed and delivered, ebriefs are considered a much more environmentally sensitive approach to large litigation filings. Animators at Law has produced e-briefs for almost fifteen years making it one of the first firms to create an ebrief. Because of its magnitude, this latest project required large teams working 24/7 with specialized training and software to complete the task that was ordered by a federal judge in a prominent intellectual property dispute. Animators was able to complete the project in no small part due to the use of ACCESS, the Animators Client Collaboration and External Sharing System. An online litigator-friendly collaborative workspace with highly interactive features,this tool enabled Animators at Law and its client to send over 100 gigabytes of data back and forth across the country. Because it allows for multiple simultaneous uploads and downloads and offers AES-256 security, ACCESS eliminated the need to send thousands of files in hundreds of different emails or via an unsecured hard drive. Animators at Law’s CEO, Ken Lopez, added, “Completion of this record-setting e-brief project capped off a series of impressive Animators at Law accomplishments in 2010. The launch of ACCESS has enhanced how litigation teams review draft trial exhibits and exchange documents with our on-site trial technicians. We have continued to grow and enhance our team and, as a direct result of those upgrades, we ended the year by doubling our fourth quarter year-over-year sales. We are very proud of our work on behalf of over 100 major law firms and corporations in 2010 and look forward to continued growth in 2011.” About Animators at Law Founded in 1995, attorney owned and operated Animators at Law provides litigation consulting, litigation graphics & litigation technology to major law firms and corporate legal departments worldwide. To date, Animators at Law has worked with more than 95% of the largest U.S. law firms and consulted on more than 10,000 cases with more than $2 trillion cumulatively at stake. The firm is well known for its high-profile work in the tobacco, transportation, pharmaceutical and energy industries. Statistically, half of Animators at Law's engagements are patent-related and most of those are tried in the Eastern District of Texas. Contact Us: Alex Brown Director of Operations brown@a2lc.com 800.337.7697
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