Insurance Industry

Overview

For most insurance companies, managing the demands of ongoing litigation across numerous jurisdictions has become a normal course of business. These companies must also contend with the challenge of litigation activities that occur in multiple states. Furthermore, regulatory requirements vary from state to state, and federal legislative actions and regulatory requirements on matters such as ERISA, securities and taxation issues must be met. Companies are also challenged by increased volume and complexity of electronically stored information (ESI) that is generated each day.

The nature of the documentation generated by insurance companies dictates that many documents are re-visited case after case. Where litigation over matters concerning public policy or class action suits, for example, there is often a need for the same documents to be reviewed many times for similar matters. Add to this the reality that most insurance litigation support teams rely on a combination of internal and outside counsel to control each matter, and it is easy to see how duplication of effort, lack of coordination and increased cost present risks. Outside counsel may turn to local counsel to handle some of the workload. When this occurs, data exists inside different law firms with little visibility or control by the corporate counsel, and the corporate client loses control over how a specific document is coded, classified and produced. Corporations face increased risk from documents being produced in one case but withheld in another, and without a standardized discovery process, they might pay multiple times for the same document to be collected and reviewed, without the benefit of the prior effort from previous cases.

Challenges

Insurance companies must regain control over the litigation process by providing access to those documents that are constantly in reuse. They must ensure that documents are fully secured and made available outside the corporate firewall to authorized users from approved law firms and to third-party experts, provide access to outside firms for some cases, and restrict access to others. They need to retain accountability over their data as cases spread out over different law firms’ networks.

Corporations must impose greater control over the Discovery process, updating procedures to satisfy the new FRCP requirements, to meet the demands of regulatory compliance with government agencies for federally legislated matters such as ERISA and HIPPA, and the multiple regulatory requirements of doing business in several states. All of these challenges must be met cost-effectively, in a manner that increases cost predictability for corporate budgeting purposes and that ensures the security of intellectual property.

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 government agencies such as ERISA and HIPPA.

Evidence loading time, costs and errors are greatly reduced by direct data connectors to corporate IT systems such as email archives and content management applications. Administration of the solution 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.

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 cases and regulatory response. 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

 

<< Prev

Next >>