Customizing the Best Practices

Use the Best Practices straight out of the box, or customize them to match the specifics of your practice, technology, staff, and structure

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Make it yours.

Litigation Best Practices in a Box is completely customizable. You can edit the text, you can change the look, you can even add or delete entire chapters.

Why customize?

Litigation Best Practices in a Box can be used "as is", straight out of the box. That's the way a lot of firms -- especially smaller firms -- choose to use it.

Many large firms, however, choose to customize it. Why would they do that? Well, there are a couple of reasons.

First, customization enables you to "tune" the Best Practices so they very precisely fit your firm -- for example, adding names and contact information for your Litigation Support Director or a preferred scanning service or e-discovery firm.

But second, for many large firms, the Best Practices product is really a short-cut to creating their own Best Practices.

Let's talk about that second reason first.

Creating Best Practices from scratch is a massive task

Many large firms have the internal expertise to develop a set of Best Practices for litigation. Those firms have large practice support and litigation support teams that have day-to-day responsibility for the kind of tasks that are covered by our Best Practices.

One of the senior people in those teams could create a Best Practices document, given the dedicated time to do it. A reasonable time-table for creating a product equivalent to Litigation Best Practices in a Box might be twelve to eighteen months -- assuming that person could be spared from regular day-to-day job responsibilities.

More commonly, the person with the right expertise can't be spared from day to day activity, so the firm takes one of these approaches:

(a) makes the task a part-time assignment

(b) gives it to someone with less expertise who can be spared

(c) distributes pieces of the task to a large number of people

And these are the typical outcomes:

Under solution (a), the task never gets done.

Under solution (b), the necessary expertise is missing and the resulting product never meets expectations.

Under solution (c), only a few pieces get completed, and they're a mishmash of styles, levels of detail, and contradictions.

In addition, under both (a) and (b), the firm spends a lot of salary dollars on the project (as well as giving up a lot of billable hours). And under (c) it's rare that a usable product gets delivered.

We know firms that have undertaken such projects, and we've seen all three approaches. In most cases, they've foundered and -- two years later -- have little to show for the effort.

Another approach

Other large firms with the same level of expertise have used a different approach:

They've taken Litigation Best Practices in a Box as their starting point - their base - and they've edited it to make it a more precise fit with their firms and their practice profiles.

The result is a custom set of Best Practices that can go online in a matter of a few months with a minimum expenditure of personnel time and salary dollars.

What type of customization do firms do?

Let's say that you do want to customize the Best Practices. What kind of modifications might you want to make? Here are some ways that firms customize their copy of the Best Practices:

People and Organizations. There are many places in the Best Practices where it can be helpful to add references to specific people, departments, offices, or suppliers used by the firm.

In the new release of the Best Practices, we've added a section on "Internal Law Firm Resources". This section is optional and if you decide to use it, we intend that you edit it. It contains "boiler plate" or "model" text that describes a typical firm's technology, staff, and other litigation resources. You then edit it so that it describes your firm -- including such information as the contact details for your litigation support managers, for example.
Cases. If the firm specializes in a particular type of litigation, you may want to customize the Best Practices to include detailed instructions aimed specifically at those cases. For example, if your firm does a lot of pharmaceutical products liability, maybe you'll want to add a chapter that gives specific instructions for redacting patient information from the records of clinical studies.
Technology. The Best Practices refer to technology by general category, not by specific brand. You could edit the Best Practices to include specific references to the products used in your firm. You could even add links to web sites and user guides for the products.
Processes.The Best Practices outline some very detailed and specific processes and procedures. In some cases, you may implement variations of those processes. If you do, it would be helpful to edit the Best Practices to include your modifications.

How hard is it?

We've designed the Best Practices to be customizable. We created it in standard HTML to facilitate editing. And (for the technically inclined), we've used CSS (Cascading Style Sheets - the web's version of the "styles" you use in your word processor) to simplify modifications to the look of the pages.