Jane Gennarelli

Principal

Jane Gennarelli has been working in litigation information management since 1978.

She began her career in the legal department of ITT, as a team member responsible for selecting documents to be produced in a major antitrust litigation. In 1980 she went to work for a major vendor of litigation support services, as a project manager responsible for effective management of coding and image capture projects.

In 1985 she joined JFS, then a small litigation support consulting and project management firm. There, as a Project Director and later as Vice President of Consulting Services, she worked directly with law firm and law department clients to design and manage a wide variety of major litigation projects.

Over the years, Jane has worked with her clients on a wide variety of tasks, including, for example:

Database design
Information flow design
Vendor selection and management
Development of subject code outlines
Development of screening criteria
Management of screening projects
Creation of procedure manuals and user documentation
Coding and image capture project management
Deposition summary project management
Management of document productions
End-user training in the use of litigation support databases
Design of law firm litigation support departments
Facilitating case planning meetings
Development of best practices for law firm paralegal staff in day-to-day litigation related activities

As a consultant with JFS, Jane also developed a "pilot project" process for helping clients to develop and apply case plans and best practices to specific families of litigation. Under this approach, Jane would lead the litigation team in a one or two day case planning meeting that would develop a complete information management plan for the case, including general processes and a database design. The goal was to walk the team through a planning process that they could later apply themselves to new cases.

Jane also worked with large firms to define and apply practice-wide best practices that suited each firm's mix of cases and its organizational structure and culture.

As a consultant, Jane has met with hundreds of law firms and thousands of litigators, legal assistants and litigation support managers. She has learned first hand what litigators need, how they approach their work, what things work well, and where things go wrong. That broad exposure forms the basis for her current Best Practices work.

In September of 2000, Jane left JFS to continue her career as an independent consultant and then, in 2003, to form Magellan's Law.