CaseMap Provides a Chart For the Geography of Litigation
Reprinted with permission. As printed in the April 1998 issue of

BY CARY GRIFFITH

CASEMAP is easiest to describe for what it is not. The software is not a personal information manager, a case-management program or a formal outliner. Instead, it’s a kind of marriage between all three types of applications. Unlike anything else on the market today, CaseMap is charting new territory in the war on managing litigation. A generation ago, litigators still prepared for trial using yellow legal pads. For truly large cases, some attorneys used elaborate manual systems involving note cards, typed indexes and cross-references. The legal pad and the manual systems were designed to manage the details of the case: facts, issues, questions and similar kinds of information. There was a point where the volume of details about a case became too large, and efforts to manually manage the information became impossible. Today, technology is enabling us to map entirely new territories of litigation management. CaseSoft CEO Greg Krehel points to four primary purposes for CaseMap:

• It provides litigators with a tool that enables them to organize key facts and issues about a lawsuit;
• It helps lawyers make evaluative judgments about that suit (such as which facts and issues about the case are good and which ones are bad);
• It gives lawyers a way to explore the rich detail surrounding a case in a way not previously possible;
• And, of most interest to corporate counsel, it enables in-house counsel and others on a litigation team to easily communicate and share important information.

Corporate counsel will find an application like CaseMap useful because of its ability to keep you informed. In instances in which corporate counsel has hired an outside firm to manage a particular case, CaseMap can be used to periodically provide a database about the litigation.

A simple Backup and Restore routine can be used to periodically save and compress the entire database on one particular case. Once saved, it can be sent via disk or mailed as an attachment to e-mail. When an in-house attorney receives the e-mail, he or she can decompress the attachment and be walked through the process of updating that particular case file.

The new information can be easily reviewed using CaseMap’s Data Refinery feature. Under a Create Refiners tab, users can select a What’s New button, enter a date and review only the litigation information posted since that date.

Of course today, more legal departments are trying their own cases or at the very least taking an active partnership role with outside counsel in trying the case. In both instances, an application like CaseMap can be invaluable.

Consider the geography of the complex case. For starters, your particular piece of litigation likely has a large number of facts and an almost commensurate number of issues covering several months or years. With CaseMap you can manage those facts and issues in a variety of complex ways.

Take, for example, Sunrise v. Diamond – one of two sample cases with which the CaseMap application is shipped. Over the course of several months you’ve been working on this case. During that time you have entered more and more information into CaseMap, including a variety of facts, issues, questions and other information. You’re describing the case to a colleague, highlighting the massive number of facts in the matter, and she’s doubtful. “I can’t believe there are that many facts.”

You call up CaseMap, click on a Statistics tab icon in the toolbar and get detailed statistics about Sunrise, including that there are 328 facts in your case.

Just to drive home your point you call up the Fact tab and click on the CaseWide graphical icon in the tab’s toolbar (see figure 1). A graphical bar chart appears with a chronology showing when your facts happened.

The view in Figure 1 depicts a three-year period divided into months. You can also view your chronology in year or day mode – if you want to view a broader chronological picture, or more detail.

“Look at that,” you comment. “December 1996 was the high point in this case.” You move your cursor over the bar and the number of facts appears: 30 facts.

The four main tabs in CaseMap describe the primary categories of litigation information this application was designed to track: Fact, Object, Issue and Question. For the Sunrise case, tracking the facts involves tracking a variety of pieces of information about those facts, including the date and time the fact occurred, a description of the fact, whether it was disputed, and objective evaluations about those facts from both an in-house and opponent perspective.

CaseMap uses evaluation symbols to graphically show whether a fact is Heavily For Us, For Us, Neutral, Against Us, Heavily Against Us, Unsure and Unevaluated. Of course, your facts can be sorted by any of these categories, or any of the other fields of information previously described.

For the Sunrise case there are 21 fields of information that can be tracked and displayed using CaseMap. If, midway through the case, you wanted to add another field to the fact-tab information, it would take less than a minute.

The Object tab gives users the ability to track Persons, Organizations, Documents, Physical Evidence, Events, Places and an assortment of other kinds of information. Like all else in CaseMap, objects can be created and added if the case warrants it.

In the Sunrise case, each object contains approximately 25 pieces of information that can be tracked. If you wanted to track the smoking status of people involved with the case, but had not anticipated doing so when the case started, you can easily add a smoking status field to your objects. And you can even create a pull-down menu that identifies possible information contained in this field, making information entry extremely simple.

Strength and Weakness
The preceding are just some of the many kinds of information available at your fingertips when using CaseMap. In fact, using CaseMap you have so many ways to enter, revise, sort, link, summarize and evaluate case information, its complexity and power may also be its greatest weakness.

In fairness to CaseMap, I reviewed this application with a litigator, and the categories and ways in which litigation information could be sorted, displayed, summarized and evaluated made a great deal of sense to her. However, CaseMap still requires spending some time to learn how to use it. It’s not an application for those who are not technologically savvy.

Because CaseMap is so powerful, it requires a fair amount of horsepower. It is what’s called in the industry as a fully 32-bit application, meaning it will not run on anything less than Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows NT (will also run successfully on a Macintosh running SoftWindows). And of course the bigger the PC, the better. A Pentium 200 with 32 MB of RAM would be an excellent candidate for enabling users to make the most of CaseMap. CaseMap is for the computer-literate attorney – the one who uses computer and information technology as an extension of his or her intellect. This kind of person has computing power to back him or her up. What CaseMap does exceedingly well is organize litigation information for such a person.

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