Mass litigation

There comes a rather unremarkable moment in the life of a legal department when someone opens a new case and realises they already know the story.

The claimant, court and case number may have changed. The facts, arguments and documents, however, look remarkably familiar.

When this happens dozens, hundreds or even thousands of times, the company is no longer dealing with a series of isolated disputes. It is dealing with mass litigation..

Mass litigation arises when an organisation manages a large number of legal claims with similar characteristics. They may relate to the same product, contract, procedure, service or type of complaint.

It is particularly common in banking, insurance, telecommunications, retail, transport and utilities. After all, the more customers, employees and contracts an organisation has, the greater the chance that one problem will repeat itself.

Each case still requires legal analysis. However, volume introduces a different challenge: managing information, deadlines, costs, stakeholders and decisions without losing sight of the overall picture.

At that point, the problem is no longer exclusively legal. It becomes operational too.

How is mass litigation managed?

Management begins as soon as a new case reaches the legal department.

First, the team must record the subject matter, parties, court, financial value and relevant deadlines. It should also identify the responsible people, supporting documents and level of risk.

When this information follows consistent criteria, the team can group similar cases and identify patterns. Without that structure, every case appears new, even when it is simply another episode in a very familiar series.

The legal department can then define guidelines for each type of dispute. These may include the legal arguments to use, the documents required, settlement criteria and approval levels.

Standardisation does not remove the need for individual analysis. Instead, it prevents the team from rebuilding the same strategy whenever a similar case arrives.

In addition, ongoing management involves hearings, internal communications, financial provisions, legal fees and requests for information. In many organisations, it also involves several external law firms.

Without a common structure, information quickly becomes fragmented. It ends up scattered across emails, shared folders, spreadsheets and reports prepared in different formats.

The legal department knows how many cases exist. Finance knows some of the costs. Senior management wants to understand the risk. Yet they are not always looking at the same figures.

When volume becomes the real problem

A manual task may appear harmless when it only affects one case. Repeated five hundred times, it becomes a very tangible operational cost.

The same applies to an incorrect classification, a missing document or an update that never reaches the right person.

The main challenge of mass litigation is therefore not limited to legal complexity. It lies in repetition.

As volumes increase, maintaining consistent strategies becomes more difficult. The risk of delays, errors and decisions based on incomplete information also grows.

Meanwhile, the team spends too much time searching for documents, updating reports and confirming case statuses. That time is no longer available for risk analysis, negotiation or advising the business.

Mass litigation begins to occupy the legal department in two different ways: through the complexity of the cases and through the operational effort required to keep them organised.

How Legal Ops and LegalTech can help

A legal management platform can centralise cases, documents, deadlines, costs, tasks and stakeholders.

As a result, the team can access the full history of a case without carrying out repeated searches. It can also see who is responsible and what needs to happen next.

Technology can also automate recurring tasks, including reminders, assignments, approval requests and status updates.

A new case may, for example, automatically generate a set of tasks. It may also identify the required documents and notify the relevant people.

Legal decisions remain in the hands of legal professionals. However, the progress of a case no longer depends on someone remembering every administrative step.

Dashboards can also help teams monitor relevant indicators, such as:

• Number of active cases;
• Total value at risk;
• Average cost per case;
• External legal fees;
• Average case duration;
• Success rate;
• Settlements reached;
• Most common dispute categories.

Reporting therefore stops being a monthly reconstruction exercise based on several disconnected sources. Instead, it reflects the information captured during daily work.

Technology alone, however, cannot fix a poorly organised process. At best, it can make that process faster and easier to search.

This is precisely where Legal Operations comes in.

Legal Ops applies management principles to legal work. It defines processes, responsibilities, performance indicators, collaboration rules and criteria for the use of technology.

Before automating anything, the organisation must decide how cases will be classified. It must also define which information should be recorded and who is authorised to approve each decision.

Legal Ops creates the structure. LegalTech helps apply it consistently, even as the volume of work increases.

From legal cases to business intelligence

A litigation portfolio can reveal a great deal about the organisation itself.

When several cases result from the same clause, the contract may need to be reviewed. When complaints repeatedly concern the same product, there may be an operational issue behind them.

Likewise, a strategy that consistently produces unfavourable outcomes should be reconsidered. Repeating it simply because “this is how we have always done it” rarely improves the results.

With structured data, the legal department can identify trends and share them with other areas of the business. It can therefore help address the source of recurring disputes.

The goal is no longer limited to managing existing cases more effectively. It also becomes possible to prevent the same issue from continuing to generate new ones.

Managing mass litigation will always require legal expertise and close attention to detail. It should not, however, require hours of administrative work simply to locate basic information.

Rolling Legal centralises cases, deadlines, documents, costs and tasks. It also automates workflows and provides a consolidated view of legal operations.

Because when cases repeat themselves, disorganisation does not have to follow the same pattern.