Add Your PerspectiveNovember 28, 2009

Early Case Assessments: More on the ECA Toolkit from PD Villareal

“In 60 days . . . you will know 80 percent of what you will ever know about a case.”  PD Villareal’s quote was critical to our efforts to define Early Case Assessment in 2008 as we started our series on ECA, and we’re always happy to hear more from him.   Fortunately, an interview with Villareal in this month’s Metropolitan Corproate Counsel gives us just that.

CPR’s Early Case Assessment Guidelines Revisited

In CPR’s ECA Toolkit – A Great Contribution to Controlling Litigation Costs, Villareal discusses CPR’s new ECA guidlines and Early Case Assessments on a broader level.  Villareal jumps right in to tell us how ECA differs from the status quo:

The thing about lawyers is that by mindset and by training, they will want to collect facts and analyze them forever because every additional piece of More…

Categories: ECA

5 PerspectivesAugust 16, 2009

CPR Publishes Early Case Assessment Guidelines

You can’t settle your case before you know what it’s worth — or at least you shouldn’t — so we discussed why it’s best to value your dispute before settlement discussions start a few months ago.  This fact has driven an entire series on Early Case Assessments here on Settlement Perspectives, and it’s clear I’m not the only in-house ECA fan out there.

The International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution, known also as the CPR Institute, has recently published CPR’s Early Case Assessment “ECA” Guidelines (2009), which are designed to “set forth a process designed to help More…

Categories: ECA, Tactics

Add Your PerspectiveJuly 25, 2009

The Partner Focus Group: An Easy Way to Get The Extra Perspective You Need

There’s something exciting about a war room as the big case turns toward trial, and ours was no different — witness notebooks, research files, box after box of “hot” documents, and a whiteboard with the latest graphic to explain it all.  After days in that war room we began to wonder:  Why won’t the other side settle?  How could they not understand how bad their case was?

A Fresh Perspective from Down the Hall

One of the firm’s senior lawyers wandered by the conference room and asked a few questions to break up the evening.  He listened to our quick pitch on the case, and sat down to probe a bit more.  Our stories were followed by one of his own — an old case whose plaintiff sounded more like our plaintiff than not.  The more we talked the better we understood where our opponent More…

Categories: ECA, Settlement

Add Your PerspectiveJune 26, 2009

UDR: An Introduction to Unconventional Dispute Resolution

As I have said before, if you really want to cut your litigation costs, step one is to have less litigation.  Step two, however, is just as important:  actively manage what’s left.  This post will explore a great way to do both — UDR.

We’re at a point where lawyers who are effective at getting cases settled are often thought to be afraid of trial, yet real trial lawyers often forget that their clients have more important business than litigation.  Which approach will you choose as your next case begins?  With Unconventional Dispute Resolution you can integrate both, so you don’t have to choose either — until the choice is actually yours.

What is UDR?

So what is UDR?  There’s no single element of Unconventional Dispute Resolution that’s truly new, but UDR combines 7 component parts in a way I haven’t seen before.  These elements — each of which is critical to the success of the whole — include:

1. Early Case Assessment
2. Aligned Fee Agreements More…

Categories: ADR, ECA, Miscellaneous, Settlement