While there are several mandates that revolve around day-to-day responsibilities of a general counsel, litigation management has always been one the most challenging and time-consuming aspects that seek attention and solution towards. Lex Witness in a special initiative brings to you one of the most insightful coffee table conversations between Anindya Majumdar – Head Legal, Meru Cabs and Parimal Chanchani, Director, Uberall Practice League where they discuss an overall experience on a successfully implemented litigation management plan.
In one of my previous companies we had tried to build a similar software from scratch and that turned out of be a very expensive proposition. It was a very painstaking process, that took a greater part of 2 half years.
I was a part of that team and I had helped in building that from scratch, the various modules, the interfaces and the testing, was all done but it still somehow just didn’t work. So, when I saw your software which met all my requirements, which ticks all my checkboxes and it was something that was readily available, off the shelf and was customisable, I went for it.
Because very few companies have this kind of software, I have worked with some of biggest companies in India earlier and this one company, which has a huge litigation database also had an in-house customised software built by their own team and even that is nowhere as good as what you have developed. You have kept it very simple. Sometime in-house teams forget the core job of a software and in trying to build something, the technology becomes, too complex, too over-empowering. However, here it’s very easy with Uberall and that’s the beauty of it.
Before me trying my hand, my predecessor had spent 2 years on that and i spent another 2 ½ years so that’s 4 and half years down the drain and still we were not able to do a good job of it.
Yes, you are absolutely right. You’ve understood the pain very well and the saddest thing of all of this that would have been expected from two in house people interacting and trying to create something, which was completely missing. For e.g. when I was trying to say something to your support team, they caught on very quickly. When I was trying to say something to you, you anticipated my needs. What you did is, you went to law firms and you received cutting edge advice as to what actually is the requirement of a software.
The starting point I should say is when you reach a threshold of more than a hundred cases because once you have 100 cases, you need a certain number of people in managing those 100 cases and they will be spread across different locations and they will be of a different nature and they will be giving you different kinds of pain. Now while an excel sheet functions well but and an excel sheet has its limitations. So in terms of a litigation management software like Uberall or something similar in the market you will need a lot of dates to be juggled and you can’t commit that to memory and an excel sheet is not reliable because its prone to glitches and has a lot of human intervention. With Uberall or a similar software once you enter it you know that the data is sacrosanct and you will ofcourse be getting a pop up before the date and you can always go back and check what happened to that prior to your joining or 5 years before your joining, you have historical data as well over there so you can see the lifeline of the case which an excel sheet doesn’t do. So that’s the whole purpose of a software, because in India sadly litigation gets resolved in decades, it doesn’t get resolved in years and months so recordkeeping becomes a huge nightmare.
Having a simple solution like Uberall which gives you exactly what you need, not the 100% data, but 60-70% that you require for decision making or for analysis or dashboards , let’s say for filing an appeal 10 years down the line, that all Uberall will be able to do very well. So, when I saw all that in your software, I knew that you have understood exactly what the pain is. Only then can you devise a solution to that pain with a software or anything of that sort and your understanding is because of your interactions with your law firms like Khaitan and Co.
Very good question. The data migration and transition process is a very important part and it helps if the software is customisable which in your case it was because everybody has their own excel sheet and their own way of maintaining data which has been there for years and adapting to something new, which does not have data in your format can be difficult. But with Uberall you’re able get that with the data migration and the shift to the digital or an online platform was made easy.
That helped and with the bulk upload facility we were able to get the same fields which our excel sheet contains plus an added few fields which were required but which nobody had thought of, was an added bonus and that all helped in the total migration experience. Now we have a much better finished product.
The follow-up has become very strong, I mean, earlier you had this manual exercise of opening an excel sheet or opening your diaries and checking the dates you have listed, going back and forth finding the pages and even then you’d miss something despite the fact that it’s your own diary. With Uberall, at 12 o’clock in the night you get a list of emails which detail what are the cases that’s going to come up in the next 3 days, what are the cases that are going the come up in a week’s time or what is the development that has happened in case anybody has updated the case. So the follow-up has become very strong and all that you have you do to get that email, is just flag it and its there in your inbox waiting for action to be taken. So it’s a great sync between both the software as well as your Ms-outlook. You are not just on the software, your outlook is already lining up emails as to what has happened in the software. Your follow-up becomes very strong and for litigation, follow-up is very important.
I am a non-technical person, I am a lawyer, when you’re dealing with a technical person obviously certain amount of friction and amount of confusion maybe there, but that has never happened with your team, because they have been unfailingly polite. The likes of Avinash and even Ranjit, they have been very polite, very good in handholding us through the process migration, the experience has been very smooth. It has been unlike any experience I have had with any previous technology company.
I had made a few suggestions in writing to Avinash and infact he has worked on it and implemented it already. Additionally, what we wanted was a dashboard which you already had, but we wanted a bit more sophisticated, more detailed, more customisable dashboard, which they have delivered. So in terms of at least our litigation needs that was the only one thing which I needed. I am also interested in your larger contract suite that you have, possibly next year I may sign up for that.
I would definitely recommend Uberall to all my peers, I would recommend it to all companies, I would certainly ensure that we have Uberall there or a similar software there because it’s very user friendly, has high degree of customisation, updating of data is so easy and these are the 3 main pain areas because a lawyer is a nontechnical person, if he has to use a software he wants it to be something similar to the experience that he gets from opening his diary which has everything at one go, and that is what Uberall does, so I would definitely recommend it.
My pleasure
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