How Does Financial Litigation Support Fit Into Legal Cases?

Financial litigation can be a difficult process, even if you have a lot of experience dealing with it as a lawyer or business person. Unsurprisingly, many parties end up needing some form of financial litigation support. You might wonder what it is, why you might need a third party's help, and how it may fit into your case.

What Is Financial Litigation Support?

Conducting financial investigations is rarely as simple as looking for a single entry in a file. Most defendants are involved in fairly complex activities that spread across regions, industries, and even areas of legal relevance. Jumping into all of that data is rarely easy, whether you're dealing with a case involving negligence or fraud. Even when you're dealing with publicly available information, such as FINRA disclosures for a stock trading case, it can be challenging just to go through the bulk of what's available.

Similarly, litigants often need to think about what isn't there. Particularly in compliance cases, you sometimes have to prove the absence of required materials. If you're sorting through a truth-in-lending case, for example, the entire argument may hinge on whether or not the defendant provided appropriate disclosures to the plaintiff before the two parties entered a loan agreement. It takes time to establish that something is missing. 

Why Turn to a Third Party for Assistance?

Financial litigation support providers offer help handling various problems. If you're handling a larger-than-usual case against a multinational corporation, for example, the defense may try to simply bury you in discovery materials. Suppose you asked for all of the C-suite emails on the company officers' compliance with lockout rules regarding insider sales of shares. Rather than just send you copies of those emails, they might send you everything they have that's even tangentially related to the matter.

Working with a third party in such a scenario can help a financial litigation team in several ways. Foremost, it simply provides more eyeballs and analytics software to go through more documents. Secondly, they can provide specialized support with issues like state and local laws. Thirdly, a financial litigation support firm often has relationships with experts who can explain highly nuanced regulations.

Fitting Support into Your Case

It's important to think about the tasks you'll need to assign to the support professionals. For example, an attorney might need to develop a witness list. They can have the support team go through things like meeting minutes to determine who was present at key moments. Working from the witness list, the attorney can then conduct depositions.

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