Energy, Oil & Gas Industry

Overview

Energy companies are no strangers to litigation. At any given time, an energy supplier may be involved in a variety of matters, including contractual disputes, joint operating agreements, antitrust lawsuits, and patent infringement.

While managing the various litigation matters that typify the energy industry, the litigation teams that serve these companies must also contend with environmental compliance issues and regulatory matters on both the state and federal level.  They may be required to respond to regulatory requests from agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Ancillary areas of OSHA enforcement may come into play for matters pertaining to wrongful death and workers compensation. Companies that do business in more than one state face the burden of meeting the disparate requirements of multiple state agencies.

Litigation and regulatory compliance activities generate large volumes of data that must be managed, sorted, reviewed and produced. The costs associated with managing these volumes must be carefully mitigated in order for energy companies to keep a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Challenges

Litigation and regulatory compliance have always posed challenges to corporations, but the broadening scope of information sources that are subject to response brings with it the challenge of managing larger and more complex volumes of data, intellectual property and business correspondence. Any generated document could become important in a legal matter, and the legal team may find that a subset of the generated documentation is pertinent not only to one legal or regulatory matter, but many.

Companies must find a way to leverage the accumulated work that goes into each document during search, culling, review and production of each case. They must maintain confidentiality of trade secrets and intellectual property while achieving compliance with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure governing discovery.

Furthermore, regulatory response often requires quick turnaround with specific production formats. For example, an energy producer litigating toxics in multiple states might be required to respond to several state regulatory agencies, all with different requirements. The corporation would have to produce the same data in a variety of formats. To successfully meet aggressive production deadlines, the litigation team must develop and apply a standard work process that facilitates the contributions of outside council without relinquishing control over the data. These problems must be solved without impacting the resources of the corporate IT department.

Solution

The CaseCentral® Corporate Edition™ is an ideal solution for the above described challenges, turning discovery into a repeatable business process. A standardized workflow on one centralized, secure platform enables the efficient management of massive electronic discovery and ongoing response to regulatory requests from agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Data connectors reduce conversion costs and errors, and the integrated ability to leverage the previous work of the litigation team leads to faster, less expensive production cycles.  Administration is centralized within the corporate litigation support group, which maintains control over matters and evidence by granting access to outside counsel on a firm-by-firm and user-by-user basis. This eliminates behind-the-firewall security concerns and enables high performance access to tens of millions of documents to external legal counsel. Litigation teams can collaborate effectively across geographic boundaries to search and organize massive amounts of information. When a document is reviewed, all of the values added by each firm are retained, including designations, annotations, and redactions. This builds an institutionalized knowledge base that can be applied across future investigations. Flexible production formats, and the option of producing imaged or native files in any standard format enable energy companies to quickly respond to regulatory matters. CaseCentral scales easily to meet the demands of increasing data volumes and case sizes with no in-house IT maintenance or expense.

Benefits

• One centralized review platform delivers unprecedented transparency and control over regulatory response and litigation activities across law firms
• One centralized review platform also minimizes the security concerns that come along with production of sensitive information outside the corporate firewall
• Repeatable, defensible business processes including clear chain-of-custody address compliance with the new FRCPs governing discovery
• Reuse of administrative settings and work product across cases increases accuracy and speed, as well as incremental cost savings with every new case
• Reuse of prior work product also reduces business disruption and demands on IT staff.
• Flexible platform architecture enables adding hundreds of users in a snap, while integration with corporate email and document repositories reduces loading time, costs and errors
• Scalable implementation ensures high performance access to tens of millions of documents
• Hosted services minimize startup time and cost while also simplifying ongoing management
• Predictable pricing facilitates effective litigation budget management

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