Although most providers of litigation support services make their consultants available to law firms to help with projects, Legal Inc has gone one further and effectively set up its own recruitment arm, offering litigation support personnel at all levels.

The service, called Incterim, is described here. Although expressed primarily in terms of enabling firms with existing litigation support staff to cope with peaks and troughs, there is a big opportunity here for firms with no existing resources or experience to take on jobs for which they might otherwise feel disqualified because of the technical and procedural implications of handling even modest amounts of electronic documents.

Firms are rightly wary of stepping into the unknown, yet cannot justify the employment of full-time staff specialising in electronic disclosure. Many of the recent cases can be classified as “incompetence cases” in which significant costs and reputational consequences flowed from relatively simple mistakes or from a failure to apply the right resources at the right time.

Legal Inc’s initiative seems a good way of drawing attention to the fact that skilled people can be engaged at short notice for whatever period is needed to keep the right side of the rules and to understand what technology is available. The hard part is not in fact either of these, but lies in the lack of informed project management skills.

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