USG Corporation, one of the world's leading producers of building materials, has an in-house team of experienced lawyers who work in the corporate headquarters in Chicago. But they hardly work alone. Dealing with the same product liability cases that have overtaken the rest of their industry in recent years, the USG corporate counsel department has, at times, had to track as many as 100,000 court cases nationwide. The company, along with a group of other defendants, enlisted thirty law firms to provide outside counsel for those cases in which USG was involved.
USG needed an efficient way to monitor developments in those cases and share information with co-counsel around the country. "I've worked in product liability litigation for many years," said Martha Brown, USG senior corporate counsel. "I knew that one of the most difficult tasks is keeping everyone - in-house counsel, co-counsel, management - up to speed on all of the various issues."
Brown deployed the extranet, West WorkSpace to create a series of password-protected Web sites for posting and sharing critical information. "We found it useful right away," said Brown. "We exchange document drafts, use calendaring to update court schedules, share legal research, post articles, track cases and follow case law changes."
At any given time, USG had five to ten different cases around the country that were about to go to trial. "If one of our attorneys filed a motion on a case in Texas, we wanted our attorney in Oregon who was working on a similar case to know about it."
Many of the asbestos cases are complex, involving medical and other expert information, and can change rapidly. "We used a group of very diverse lawyers who all have very different perspectives on the litigation. West WorkSpace allows a lawyer who's really strong on the medical side, for instance, to share knowledge with a lawyer who is really good on the procedure side. The latest developments in litigation, legislation and medical research, could all be shared immediately with other members of the team."
Since June of last year, USG corporate counsel has also been dealing with a Chapter 11 restructuring. For that work, USG has retained attorneys specializing in bankruptcy law, as well as local counsel in Delaware. USG was able to reconfigure its WorkSpaces to accommodate the various legal teams working on its bankruptcy issues. For example, several other building products manufacturers have also filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware, and parts of all the cases are being heard by the same judge. With WorkSpace, the USG legal team is able to efficiently collect and distribute information on developments in the other debtors' cases.
"It's comforting to know that even though we have a diverse set of lawyers that are geographically dispersed, everyone has access to the highest common denominator of information on these cases," said Brown.
West WorkSpace provides both tremendous flexibility and control over access to information. Access to the Workspaces is strictly controlled by passwords. Brown can set aside less-critical information to be shared with other parts of the organization as needed, but restrict access to privileged information. "We don't have to distribute documents, or feed them out at a particular time. Our attorneys and co-counsel can access the documents on their own schedule anywhere they have Internet access."
Brown sets up and manages the various WorkSpaces, even though she is admittedly a "non-technie" attorney. With its ease of use and ability to coordinate vast amounts of case-critical information, USG's use of West WorkSpace has become an integral part of the legal "team." Brown notes, "there are a lot of USG attorneys both inside and outside of our organization who open up the WorkSpace the first thing when they get to work every day to see what's changed. It's an essential part of our workflow. Once you've started using it, you wouldn't think of working without it."
With that, Brown dashes off a note, attaches a recent article, and posts it on a WorkSpace to keep her nation-wide legal team informed of the day's developments.