Customer Case Study Bennett Bigelow & Leedom

Today, litigation is often managed by lawyers and paralegals using an assortment of general purpose software tools, with fragmented, ad-hoc processes that are often inefficient and not repeatable. The law firm of the future will utilize innovative technology and repeatable processes to work efficiently and streamline the work as a case progresses from e-discovery and fact development, all the way to trial. At Everchron, we call this approach to legal processes and technology, Next Level Litigation.®

After working for years as litigators at Irell & Manella, an AmLaw 200 firm based in Los Angeles, Everchron’s founders realized lawyers lacked modern, collaborative software tools designed specifically for day-to-day litigation processes. The founders created Everchron to improve the workflow, quality of information and analysis available to litigators practicing at the highest level. Everchron’s goal is to enable lawyers, paralegals, and practice support to provide better service to clients, spend less time on manual tasks, and focus more on the high level substantive work that law firms excel at. Everchron accomplishes this with a litigation management platform that is powerful but easy to use and that works for case teams rather than the other way around.

After building the initial version of the product, and gaining feedback from legal teams, Everchron entered the market more widely in 2016. Since then, Everchron has been adopted by numerous AmLaw firms and litigation boutiques to provide better organization, enhance team collaboration, and automate common litigation processes like deposition prep. This case study features the story of one of these cutting edge firms: Bennett Bigelow & Leedom (BB&L).

Background on BB&L

Bennett Bigelow & Leedom (BB&L) is one of the premier medical malpractice defense firms in the United States. BB&L represents healthcare institutions and medical professionals in all phases of medical negligence litigation, from prevention and claim investigation to discovery, trial, and appeal. BB&L has developed a reputation for defending the most complex cases in every type of medical malpractice lawsuit, including complex birth injury, wrongful death, and other catastrophic injury cases. The firm has successfully obtained hundreds of dismissals and numerous defense verdicts for its individual and institutional clients.

The Problem

Using General Purpose Tools for Legal-Specific Case Management and Analysis

While the primary focus of BB&L’s practice is in healthcare, the volume and breadth of the firm’s caseload touch on virtually every field of medicine, including critical care, oncology, obstetrics, orthopedics, neurology, and surgery. With each case, there is a unique set of circumstances, a number of health care specialists as well as witnesses, and evidence that lawyers must become intimately familiar with in order to effectively advocate on behalf of their client. 

For many years, BB&L used general purpose tools like Microsoft Excel and Word to create chronologies that are critical to understanding the story of a particular case (laying out e.g., what happened, when did it happen, who was involved, the relevant legal issues and supporting evidence). The most important facts in medical malpractice cases are typically substantiated with documentary evidence, such as police reports and medical records. BB&L lawyers would have to search for documents referenced in these Excel chronologies across a fragmented array of systems such as e-discovery databases, document management systems, and email. 

Alternatively, the firm’s support staff would be tasked with manually hyperlinking the document references, which is tedious work that can take hours in complex cases with lengthy chronologies. Even with a hyperlinked Excel chronology, there was still no way for lawyers to effectively filter their chronology, run searches on the text within the referenced documents, or export-focused reports with relevant documents for binder creation. 

These inefficiencies drove BB&L’s leadership to search for a technology solution that would  unify and integrate data in a central collaborative platform, and ultimately enable BB&L case teams to deliver results faster and more efficiently. 

The Solution

BB&L Deploys Everchron to Power-up Case Team Collaboration

In 2019, BB&L deployed an enterprise rollout of Everchron to manage case critical information and team analysis across all of its litigation matters.

BB&L integrated Everchron into its workflows from the very outset of every new litigation case. As soon as BB&L is retained as counsel, a new matter for the litigation is created in Everchron. Paralegals load relevant documents into the matter’s workspace on a rolling basis as they are obtained and draft detailed document summaries.

BB&L litigators will then review the document summaries, the documents themselves and add substantive analysis, including issue coding. Lawyers also make heavy use of Everchron’s annotation tool to highlight and add commentary regarding specific portions of lengthy documents, such as police reports and medical records.

Empowering the entire trial team with the ability to ingest, search, and connect with the evidence, be it a medical record or a piece of testimony, is my core focus for the firm. Everchron gives us the ability to do that with medical records, which most other tools fail to accommodate. Everyone in the life of the case benefits from the comprehensiveness and speed that Everchron provides us as a trial firm, from the client to the Court.

Everchron’s innovative Cloning feature is a firm favorite. BB&L teams utilize cloning to create multiple entries in the case chronology based on the same underlying document. With cloning, teams cut out the need to upload duplicate documents. For instance, a case involves a hospital discharge report dated June 1, which references a surgery on May 25. The team would create a chronology entry for the report itself, dated June 1, and use the cloning feature to create a second entry for the May 25th surgery pointing to the same report.

For a firm that previously relied on Excel to build its chronologies where support staff would either have to spend countless hours manually linking referenced documents in a separate system or be forced to locate documents when needed, BB&L now enjoys the convenience of being able to instantly view any document in Everchron. With Everchron’s dynamic chronology, BB&L case teams are able to build fact and document timelines, and instantly generate custom chronologies based on specific date ranges, witnesses, issues and more.

Everchron allows me to quickly review thousands of pages of records and easily identify and tag what is relevant for an upcoming deposition, mediation or hearing. It’s searching capability, across dates, authors and key words has made me a self-sufficient attorney on the road able to efficiently answer even the most nuanced of questions. Being nimble, responsive, and in command of the facts all at the same time gives me the power to be the best advocate I can.

When it comes time to prepare for depositions and examinations at trial, Everchron’s automatically generated witness files allow firm users to export custom, detailed excel and PDF reports, along with focused document sets for attorney binders or redwelds, with just a few clicks.

The end result for BB&L’s case teams is that they are able to move quickly and deliver more consistent results than when they relied on general purpose tools like Excel, Word, and email to accomplish the same tasks.

BB&L’s experience is emblematic of law firms and legal departments that adopt Everchron across their organizations, along with streamlined, repeatable processes for fact development and case management, allowing them to generate more thorough output and results using less resources.

Main Benefits for BB&L Case Teams

• A key document and fact chronology with instant access to referenced documents.
• Export professional reports with hyperlinks to documents for offline access.
• Automatically generated witness and issue profiles with detailed analytics.
• Annotate, comment on, and share case documents with other team members.

Growth: By The Numbers

• 300% Users
• 160% Matters