What is class action litigation? It is a legal procedure that is used to handle a law suit when many people have been injured by a common act or a set of actions. Class actions can be brought in either federal or state courts, though a recent federal law.

In the United States Federal Courts, class actions are governed by Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Defendants can move class action lawsuits from state to federal courts by the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005. A lawsuit becomes a class action when one or more plaintiffs who is called Lead Plaintiffs files a lawsuit claiming some kind of harm and then asks the court to certify the case as a class action.

What are the types of common cases in this area of litigation? They are law suits involving,

• Tobacco
• Asbestos
• Financial frauds
• Employment
• Pollution
• Breast implants
• Agent Orange (herbicide)

What makes the best class action attorneys? Previous experience in class litigation with a good track record and sufficient resources to do legal research are the main criteria that are looked into while choosing a lawyer for action class litigation.

One of the biggest advantages of class action litigation is that this type of law suit is an aggregation of a large number of individual claims. With smaller recoveries class action often makes the aggregated recovery worthy enough for the attorney's effort. Thus it increases the efficiency of litigation and also lowers the cost of litigation for the individuals involved.

Managed Outsource Solutions (MOS) is a US based legal outsourcing company that offers professional services in legal transcription, litigation support, legal research, legal document preparation, legal coding to clients in the US, Canada the UK and Australia.

Labels: Federal Rules of Civil Procedures, FRCP, legal, litigation

LPO or Legal Process Outsourcing of legal documents review is increasingly being preferred these days because document review has become a time consuming and expensive process, mainly triggered by data explosion, technological evolution, and the sudden increase in ESI (electronic stored information). One cannot also deny the fact that US practices lack consistent teams to perform document review work.

Document review in the context of litigation is done in two levels. The first level of document review is the discovery phase and first part in any litigation. This process is performed after receiving the legal "Request for production of documents". During this process the objective is to reduce the document set into a workable and responsive data set. Even though the e-discovery best practices have reduced a data set by almost 70% there still may remain millions of documents to be reviewed. This is because the total quantity of documents has multiplied several times over the years. In the second level these workable documents are reviewed more seriously by seniors.

As legal document review forms the major part of litigation expenses today law firms are trying out all methods to reduce the cost of litigation and outsourcing of e-discovery is a viable solution. During the document review process quite often millions of documents have to be searched and identified for

• Case relevance
• Confidentiality
• Privileged /protection
• "Key/hot" status

Besides in litigation, document review is also performed in matters of regulatory compliance and corporate due diligence.

The India based LPO services are a great boon in this regard because, attorneys in India doing the work come from the best law schools with a good understanding of the US legal system. They also use the best e-discovery technology, tools and processes and implement the highest level of security.

Managed Outsource Solutions (MOS) is a US based company that offers a wide range of legal outsourcing services including, legal research, litigation support, legal documentation, legal transcription, legal animation, legal coding and more for clients in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia.

Labels: e-discovery, electronic legal research, legal document review, legal process outsourcing, litigation, LPO