Technology is at the heart of the legal sector’s current, well-publicised drive for innovation. With the demands placed on in-house legal teams increasing, and legal budgets trending downwards, the pressure on outside counsel to provide genuine value to their corporate clients has never been greater.
GCs are rightly challenging firms in pitches, panel reviews and on an ongoing basis to demonstrate how they will provide that value. While in the past firms might have been able to pay lip-service to innovation, today, demonstrating efficiency through smarter ways of working and optimising resources is critical in winning and retaining clients, while also allowing firms to maintain profitability.
Many of those with top-tier dispute resolution practices are turning to Opus 2’s award-winning Magnum platform to achieve this drive to efficiency and provide their clients with greater value-add through the course of a dispute.
Over the last seven years, Magnum has been used on hundreds of cases worldwide, by 96% of the top 50 international firms and by more than 8,000 legal practitioners, quickly cementing its position as the leading tool for case management, case strategy and paperless proceedings. Not only does the Magnum system streamline the dispute process from inception to conclusion, it facilitates greater oversight, strategic collaboration and effective case management for the key decision makers involved in the dispute, from solicitors, counsel and experts, to the end client.
How does Magnum work and how can it help clients?
Released in 2011 by Graham Smith-Bernal, the entrepreneur who created LiveNote® and helped it to become the most widely-used litigation support software in the world, Magnum is a cloud-based platform that is available on a case-by-case or enterprise basis.
Designed specifically for disputes professionals, Magnum contains a suite of intuitive tools tailored to the litigation and arbitration process and replicates the way lawyers traditionally work with paper, down to digitising their highlighter pens and post-it notes. It enables central hosting and management of documents at every stage of the dispute, giving parties instant access to all relevant material which can be reviewed, tagged, highlighted, annotated, hyperlinked and searched for within one seamless interface.
While in the past firms might have been able to pay lip-service to innovation, today, demonstrating true efficiency through smarter ways of working is critical.
Taryn Auchecorne, Opus 2
All case material and strategic work product (including notes and chronologies) is housed within one system, rather than dispersed across duplicate hardcopy bundles and notebooks or disconnected emails and network drives. This enables expedient document management, quick navigation and centralised collaboration between the entire case team. Everyone (on both sides of a dispute if it is a multi-party engagement), from the partner through to the paralegal, counsel, experts and, crucially, the in-house team, has instant access to the same single data set in their own private workspace, wherever they are based. The flexibility of the cloud means that geographically dispersed cross-border teams in multinational corporations or international firms can work in tandem, organising documents consistently and sharing their strategies.
Magnum is also the world’s most advanced paperless trial solution and therefore provides a true end-to-end solution for the effective running and management of a dispute. In the hearing room, cutting-edge realtime transcription and instantaneous electronic presentation of evidence integrate seamlessly with the hearing bundle and all historic work product in the same simple system. Parties can access the live transcript feed and evidence remotely, allowing end clients to monitor and participate in the proceedings from their desk. With members of the judiciary noting that Magnum can reduce trial/hearing time by a third, the cost savings in solicitors’ and counsels’ fees and time-consuming, expensive trial bundle preparation and printing are clear.
Importantly, all of this is conducted in a highly secure, ISO-accredited hosting environment in the appropriate jurisdiction. This ensures that clients, who have increasingly heavy data protection obligations of their own, can be confident that their confidential material, whatever the level of sensitivity, is properly safeguarded.
For GCs, Magnum provides instant access to and clear visibility over all key data at all stages of a case, allowing them to more easily contribute to case strategy and providing greater control and overall management of the matter. By promoting more efficient ways of working, the most important commodity in the dispute resolution process – the expertise of their lawyers – can be focused on advancing their case, not expensive manual admin. The overall efficiencies and clear cost benefits that come from the use of Magnum mean GCs are increasingly insisting on its use on their disputes.
Magnum provides a genuine step-change in the effective strategic management and efficient conduct of proceedings end-to-end. With innovation, efficiency and cost control increasingly critical to law firms and in-house counsel, it is clear why so many legal professionals are turning to Magnum as their case management tool of choice.