1 PerspectiveAugust 2, 2012

Effective Litigation Management: The TexasBarCLE Presentation

Tomorrow I’ll be joining my longtime friends Frank Vecella and Robert Manley to present “Effective Litigation Management: Doing a Good Job at ‘Herding Cats’” at the TexasBarCLE’s 11th Annual Advanced In-House Counsel Course.  This project has been fun, productive, and educational so far, and we’re looking forward to Friday.

Hyperlinks to the PowerPoint and the Paper

The slides we plan to present, and the paper that accompanies the presentation, are available in the following formats using the following hyperlinks:

• The Paper, in .pdf format, can be accessed using this link.
• The Presentation, in PowerPoint format, can be accessed using this link.

Take a look at the presentation — you’ll be glad you did.

Categories: ADR,Decision Trees,ECA,Mediation,Negotiation,Resolution Tree,Settlement,Tactics

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