I think that cases are won or lost fairly early in the process and that planning and analysis is the key to a successful litigation strategy. The process that we have at Alto Litigation is when we take on a matter we are very clear about what the scope of our engagement is, about what the objectives are of our client, and how we’re going to execute on that. So in connection with the engagement process it may sound like a mundane step but it’s really not because if you’re not aligned with your client from the very beginning in terms of the specific scope of engagement, the manner in which fees will be charged, for example, if it’s a case where we are advising a client to pursue legal remedies and they’re going to be the plaintiff we always consider whether or not we want to align incentives with something akin to a success fee. If we’re purely in a defense posture then we talk about whether the budget that we’ve outlined for the matter is one that’s realistic and we make it a point to be accountable throughout the litigation process with respect to those early things we talk about as part of the engagement.

The next step really is to define what the clients objectives are in the litigation because often it’s not just legal objective but you have business objective that are pretty critical to the client that’s coming to us. And that process involves us analyzing the merits of the claims, but also figuring out how those fit in with the business objectives. And as often as we work with clients who enter into litigation I also talk clients out of litigation because we realize early on that maybe this isn’t’ the sort of case that you want to take to litigation.

And of course, the last step is just to execute on whatever plan we have.