See Who Should Direct Your Company’s Next Case?
"Litigation has become part of the business landscape for most companies. Companies that once faced little or no litigation now find themselves defending against "bet the company" litigation. Often the in-house attorneys are stretched too thin to guide the day-to-day management and coordination of the voluminous litigation or, in some instances, are corporate lawyers not fully familiar with the ins and outs of litigation.
"Faced with the challenge of managing their growing and increasingly complex litigation, many companies benefit from employing outside counsel with experience managing and coordinating vast litigation. These counsel, usually referred to as "national coordinating counsel," provide a link between the company, its litigation and the local counsel who handle the day-to-day litigation issues that arise in individual cases.
[snip]"Several factors are important in determining the qualities needed in a national coordinating counsel. National coordinating counsel and their team of information technology (IT) professionals, associates and paralegals should be able to employ sophisticated databases and extranet sites to share information with the client and local counsel, and to monitor the status of hundreds or thousands of cases. While a spreadsheet may be sufficient to maintain a case list in some instances, a spreadsheet is not robust enough to allow national coordinating counsel to respond to most clients’ needs and to handle large numbers of cases and documents expediently."
