Storybuilder by Everlaw [Part II]: Unlocking the Collaborative Power of Your Team

In our previous blog, we explored the major challenges legal professionals encounter when building a case. These obstacles not only make it incredibly difficult to work efficiently with collaborators but also add additional costs to both legal organizations and their clients. That’s why finding the right tool, especially one that enables and enhances remote collaboration, is essential.Storybuilder by Everlaw is a secure narrative building and trial preparation platform that gives legal teams and investigators access to a free, collaborative toolkit to prepare their arguments and build cases. Storybuilder users have the ability to:

• Upload vital documents into a Story and organize them into a cohesive case timeline annotated with people and events.

• Integrate evidence into deposition prep and other work products.

• Coordinate live deposition settings.

• Upload deposition transcripts and identify key pieces of testimony. 

Storybuilder users are able to do all of this in a real-time collaborative environment suitable for both remote and in-office work.

Storybuilder by Everlaw Features

Some of Storybuilder’s distinctive features include:

• Dashboard

   – Storybuilder’s mission control center provides a bird’s-eye view of all of the activity and information involved in preparing for a deposition or trial. The dashboard provides a comprehensive overview of Storybuilder usage for every project, enabling teams to access and organize their work into one unified location quickly. No more toggling between different tools – move seamlessly from your ediscovery workflow to your deposition workflow, all within Everlaw.
  

• Drafts and Exhibits

   – A collaborative outline-building solution that provides one central location for real-time collaboration on witness questions, trial theories, or exhibit lists. Drafts enable teams to craft cohesive outlines for depositions, case arguments, or other non-legal narratives. At the same time, Exhibits displays documents with an exhibit tab number, notes, and a bookmarked set of pages, allowing associates and paralegals to prepare and publish customized exhibit lists into a convenient PDF format in preparation for subsequent depositions or trial.
  

• Depositions

   – A full suite of deposition preparation tools integrated with Timelines and Drafts. Depositions enable attorneys to prepare and track exhibits, link them to documents, take time-stamped notes, and create post-deposition reports to assess next steps. Attorneys can also share their deposition dashboard and control access to prepare for deposing witnesses collaboratively, chat with other lawyers and paralegals in real-time during depositions, and seamlessly share their findings afterward.
  

• Timeline 

  – A collaborative tool that allows legal professionals to categorize and sort documents with their Story. As teams organize their most important documents to build narratives, Timeline serves as their collective repository for important events and their relevance to their Story. Each Timeline is associated with a particular Story, and multiple users in that Story can simultaneously work on that Timeline. With Timeline, there is no longer a need to export and import documents into other systems, eliminating complexity and high overhead costs.
  

• Transcripts and Testimony

   – Enables teams to integrate post-deposition information into trial preparation workflows. Transcripts allow electronic transcripts from court reporters to be imported into Everlaw for review, annotation, exhibit linking, and other substantive legal work on the same platform where all investigative and trial preparation work is stored. Testimony provides the ability to easily highlight, label, and preserve testimony from deposition transcripts to use as referenceable evidence in Storybuilder features like Drafts, Depositions, and Timeline.

Andrew G. Fiorella, Partner at Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan & Aronoff, LLP, says of Storybuilder: “It always struck me as a tremendous waste of knowledge, in ediscovery tools, when you would tag documents, identify important documents, try to connect a story with them, and then you left the tool. It seemed like a waste of money and time. With Storybuilder, the critical case document stays with you from the moment it’s identified, through trial, to me is the most important feature.”

Unlock the Collaborative Power of Your Team with Storybuilder by Everlaw

According to research conducted by the consultancy firm GLG, the legal world is destined to change forever post-COVID-19. Nearly half of the litigators surveyed expect their office to change physically – 56 percent anticipate less office space, and 83 percent expect more remote working arrangements. To compete in this new environment, litigators must have the ability to collaboratively organize relevant documents into a compelling body of evidence on the same unified platform where review took place and seamlessly transition between the review and post-review workflows.

Are you interested in solving these challenges? Check out “Bridging the Virtual Gap with Storybuilder by Everlaw” to learn how our free narrative-building toolkit provides legal teams with a fully collaborative environment to build their cases and prepare remotely for litigation.