Posted on December 19th, 2019
Below is a full transcript of this video.
What’s going on, fellow entrepreneurs? This is John Fagerholm again, from Metal Law Group. I’m sitting here today with one of my favorite paralegals under five feet with red hair and, I don’t know, some other qualifying thing.
Today I was coming into what we call the War Room, to have a discussion with Alisa on some of the work that she was doing for us, and it got me thinking that clients don’t understand, a lot of times, why legal fees are so high.
It’s so document-intense and so document-driven when you’re litigating that they just don’t understand.
So, Alisa here is in charge of all of our discovery, and I just wanted to have a quick conversation on camera so the viewing public could understand how intense this stuff is. So, Alisa. Without giving any specifics about names or cases or whatever, tell us what’s going on around here, what this big mess is.
This big mess is a bunch of documents that will basically allow us to decipher what each side of the legal battle has going on: what documents each side has, what we can use as leverage to help our clients. It’s basically the entire case: in this particular one, 50,000 documents, to be exact.
How do you know it was 50,000 documents?
Because we had to scan each one in.
Okay. So, you had to go through each document-
Yeah.
… and what were you deciding when you were looking at each piece of paper that came in?
Well, mainly, which ones were going to be the most responsive and the most concise to answer the discovery request for opposing counsel, and which ones were going to make our clients look the best.
What would you say is the hardest part of just getting a box ful of documents from clients?
The hardest part is-
Boxes full, not a boxful. Boxes full of clients’ documents.
The hardest part is organizing them, and understanding what each document is. Because a lot of clients, the way that they manage their companies, isn’t necessarily always online, or it wasn’t always electronic.
That’s the hardest part, is that a lot of it’s just physical copies of pink slips, and billing receipts that really don’t mean anything to us because they have client codes on them that we don’t know. So, when you have 15 years worth of client documents that say, “red jacket,” it means nothing to us but it means everything to them, you know?
Understood. And then, on top of that, clients don’t typically organize their documents in anticipation of litigation.
Correct.
And I’m not suggesting clients do that because that’s ridiculous, but if they did do that, then of course this would be much easier. But let me just kind of explain what happens.
Basically, when attorneys battle, it’s all paperwork for the most part, except the few times that you’re in court and then the trial. So, what you’re battling for is to get the evidence to prove either your case or your defense, depending on where you are with it. So, you send out these requests for discovery. They send you documents, and you’ve got to try to figure out which ones means nothing, which ones hurt you, and which ones help you.
Then you’ve got to go through every single document, you’ve got to organize them, you’ve got to figure out what your case is. And then you’ve got to take the documents that help strengthen your case, and you’ve got to put them in an organized way of how you’re going to present them at trial. Does that sound about right?
Yes.
Yeah.
And then protecting client information that’s not necessarily your client’s, but our client’s clients’. You know, that has nothing to do with the case at hand.
Right, right. Okay, so how much time would you say it’s taken you to go through these 50,000 documents?
Oh, my goodness. It was about a three-week process, and then once we actually had all the documents that we were going to use, we then had to scan them and organize them so that they were … I mean, you can’t just hand the other side documents that mean nothing to them. We have to organize them and make it, you know, understandable.
And they have to do the same for us.
Exactly.
A professional courtesy.
Once we do that, then we go through and we redact, and we date stamp all of the documents, which I calculated this time. It took me 0.08 seconds per page. And there’s 41,000 pages that we sent out, and I think an extra … it was like 15,000 photos. So, it was a lot of time.
Nice, nice. Okay. So, what would you say, time-wise? You were saying it took you about three weeks to get through these documents. Is that eight hours a day? Is that …?
No. No, it was a lot longer than eight hours a day. The longest day is always the day before it’s due, because you think you’re done and then you realize you’re not even close. So, that was almost a 20-hour day, but it was split between two of us.
Got it. So, two paralegals, one 20-hour day.
Right.
So, that’s 40 hours just right there, right?
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
So, that’s basically a week-
And the rest of them were about 10-hour days.
Yeah, for three weeks.
Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
So, anyway, Viewing Public. This is kind of why I wanted to show this, because there’s more than one time that clients have come to me and said, “Why did it take so long to do X, Y, or Z?”
It’s just simply because it’s document-driven. And sure. We can cut corners, but then how do you give the best service that you can possibly give?
So, anyway, this was a non-legal sort of video, but I wanted to introduce my favorite paralegal, and then also give you guys a clue of why things are the way they are in the legal world.
Thanks, everybody.
