Michael Mills is director of professional services and systems at Davis Polk & Wardwell, and John Tredennick is partner at Holland & Hart (H&H), a Colorado-based firm with 200 lawyers and 10 offices. Tredennick, who is also chief executive of H&H’s spin-off lit-support software company, Case Share, explained the nature of the field with an anecdote attributed to Albert Einstein. He said that the scientist, when at Princeton University, used to set students the same examination in each year of their course. When one complained that the paper was the same, the great man replied: “Yes, but the answers are different.”
Mills commented that a well-known best practice inlitigation support was to take hard-copy backups of all digital evidence to court. He likened firms doing litigation work to a drill manufacturer such as Black & Decker. “They may think they are selling drills, but they are really selling holes,” he said. Similarly, firms are effectively selling court victories to their clients and the focus must always be on the end result.
