Situation

Our client was engaged to assist a large plaintiff group in relation to a class action relating to vehicle emissions. They were looking to use a system that could track and manage group member information throughout the dispute. This included adding new groups of claimants to a register as the matter progressed. There would be thousands of claimants added at any one time.

They also needed to manage the documents each class member might submit or might otherwise be related to them. There was no "out of the box" solution that would allow both the member information and matter documentation to be easily managed in one location. The information submitted by each claimant group member was complex and would require validation before being used in the matter.

Previously this firm had managed the claimant information, and their documents in entirely separate applications which increased the time it took to manage information and documentation as well as the risk of error.

In this matter the claimant group would ultimately grow to over one hundred thousand.

Solution

Our class action and development experts have developed a template from which all our claimant management solutions are customised. This has been deployed in various ways on over 15 separate group actions.

For this matter we worked with our client to understand the information and documents they were capturing and the relevant workflows they were utilising to review following collection. We then spoke with our client's external provider of the claimant management system to facilitate a custom integration between the class management software and the review workspace.

This integration allowed the legal team to do regular and automated transfers of claimant data to the review workspace. As the fields were set, data was able to be validated on transfer with anything not complying with the standard requirements flagged for review and rectification. Following successful transfer of claimant information to their member profiles in the review workspace the legal team went about adding additional claimant information, verifying the other party’s amendments, inserting comments, uploading further supporting documents, and generally keeping track of all the claimants in the case as it progresses.

Finally, a series of custom dashboard and reports were built within the Relativity workspace to give various stakeholders high-level visibility on claimant information and matter progress. Some of these reports were automated to export at various points in time so as to be used to inform stakeholders external to the workspace.

Impact

The custom solution developed by our team allowed our client to:

• Reduce the manual work associated with operating two systems with the same or similar claimant information

• Automate the replication of certain data points across the two systems and increase the accuracy of data pushed or pulled between those systems

• Remove the risk associated with the manual work and any potential data entry errors

• Increased various stakeholders visibility of the claimant management process through the creation of custom dashboards and reporting mechanisms