1. Read the complaint submitted by the plaintiff carefully.
Take a few deep breaths, find a quiet corner and read the plaintiff's complaint carefully. When you read it for the first time, you should skim it first to understand the specific cause of action of the plaintiff. If you see something that you think is unreasonable, don't worry, because the plaintiff's statement may not be all true. After reading it the first time, you need to read it the second time sentence by sentence.
Remember, when you report a lawsuit, the first question asked by the business department must be "What is this case prosecuted for?" You should read the complaint with this question. It is necessary to repeatedly confirm that the party in the complaint is really your company, not other companies/institutions with spelling mistakes or similar names, and at the same time, it is necessary to check whether there are any mistakes when serving the complaint.
Looking back, is there a fixed step of arbitration or dispute resolution in the contract involved? If so, did the plaintiff comply with these regulations? Similar mistakes often occur, which will give your company more time to prepare for responding to the lawsuit.
2. Prepare a brief statement of the case.
This statement of the case can effectively help you concentrate on solving the core problem of the case. The statement should include the following basic information: the parties to the case, the location of the court, the presiding judge, the plaintiff's cause of action, the compensation requested by the plaintiff (monetary compensation amount, whether to apply for an injunction, etc.). You can also start to list your company's defense reasons and main basis.
3, determine the key written documents and witnesses
When writing the case statement, you can list the key documents related to the case or appearing in the complaint, including contracts, emails, ppt, etc. , and collect all documents as soon as possible according to this list. If the complaint mentions any specific company employee, you need to start making a list of key witnesses.
If the complaint itself does not mention the specific employees of the company, then you need to seriously consider the business departments related to the case. They can help you identify the key witnesses involved and help you find and collect all the key written documents.
4, the company's internal litigation evidence retention
It must be done at once! Nowadays, litigation is often more like a game of "catching small plaits" in evidence discovery than debating substantive legal issues in court. It is very important to keep litigation evidence within the company.
Make full use of the list you prepared in the third step to determine which company employees you want to contact, so as to ensure that you can inform them to keep important documents related to the case "one by one", including paper documents, electronic documents, drafts, schedules, information in instant messaging software and so on. You should usually prepare a formatted notice of retention of evidence in litigation. In the stage of evidence preservation, you should keep all the evidence as much as possible.
Corporate legal affairs need to grasp the direction of litigation evidence preservation. With the development of the case, the company's legal affairs should constantly update and modify the list of departments and employees who need to keep litigation evidence, regularly (monthly or quarterly) remind relevant personnel to pay attention to the preservation of relevant documents of the case, and even ask them to send a receipt to make it clear that they have received the Notice of Retention of Litigation Evidence and understand their related obligations.
5. Who needs to know the situation and progress of the case?
If the subject matter of the case is small, only a few people need to know. However, if it is a major lawsuit, the company's legal affairs should promptly notify the CEO and CFO, as well as other board members and all senior management. As a company lawyer, you should always keep in mind that company executives usually can't fully understand the case from the legal level.
Therefore, you may need to provide them with some basic introductions about litigation procedures and related laws and regulations to avoid excessive tension among senior managers. At the same time, due to the high openness of litigation cases, the media will also pay close attention to some cases that they are interested in. For example, the media pays special attention to the labor dispute cases in which employees sue the company.
Therefore, unless the case is very simple or the target is very small, the company's legal affairs should communicate with the company's public relations team in time to let them know the latest progress of the case. Preparing a media statement in advance will play a role of "saving lives" at a critical moment. If your company is a listed company, you need to inform the investor relations team and the disclosure committee immediately, and you may also start preparing for major litigation disclosure.
6. Determine whether the cause of action is within the insurance scope of the company.
As a company lawyer, after fully understanding the cause of the case, you need to sit down with the insurance broker or the team in charge of insurance clauses in the company and carefully study whether the plaintiff's cause of action is within the company's insurance scope, such as directors' and executives' liability insurance, error and omission liability insurance, and commercial comprehensive liability insurance (CGL). Check all the insurance clauses of the company carefully.
At the same time, it should be noted that whether the insurance company underwrites is not based on the so-called cause of action listed by the plaintiff in the complaint, but on the factual issues involved in the cause of action. Therefore, don't arbitrarily think that the current lawsuit has nothing to do with the insurance coverage of the company just because the cause of action listed in the headline of the complaint doesn't seem to be covered.
If there are any facts in the case or complaint that you think should trigger insurance liability, contact the insurance company or the insurance team within the company immediately.
7. Hire an outside lawyer
Unless your company decides that all litigation cases will be represented by the legal department, you will need to hire an outside lawyer. You can choose a lawyer according to the existing "external lawyer library" of the Ministry of Justice, but this choice should not be a "slap in the face" decision, but many factors need to be considered, including the location of the court, whether the plaintiff's prosecution is based on some special laws, who is the plaintiff's attorney, and how big the subject matter involved in the case is.
If the court has issued a temporary restraining order (TRO), then you have no time to think twice. All you have to do is hire an outside lawyer and start acting immediately. But if you have time, you have to weigh again and again which law firm is the best choice for the current case. If you have enough time and conditions, you need to start a formal bidding procedure as much as possible, so that you can fully compare the advantages and rates of several law firms.
In addition, in the bidding process, law firms usually put forward preliminary litigation strategies-even if you don't choose this law firm in the end, you can use their strategies.
8. Can the case be settled directly or solved quickly by other means? ?
Even if the plaintiff has filed a lawsuit with the court and the court has filed a case, it does not mean that the case cannot be settled quickly through reconciliation. I have encountered several cases in my career, that is, the disputes between the two sides were completely solved by one or two phone calls. Of course, this situation is usually due to misunderstandings between the two sides in some important cases. As long as there is full communication, the problem can be solved.
Before starting a "lawsuit", as a corporate lawyer, it is necessary to spend some time thinking carefully about whether the case can be settled quickly through reconciliation or other means. For example, in this case, can settlement be an attractive solution for the plaintiff? Or is the plaintiff suing only because your company is in arrears with a certain amount of money, which can be solved quickly if it is paid in time?