Pioneering Legal Innovation: Labaton Sucharow's Automated Approach to Growth

Labaton Sucharow LLP, employs over 60 lawyers in offices in New York, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. For more than half a century, they helped their clients recover losses and demand corporate reform. The Firm prosecutes precedent-setting class and direct actions and has recovered more than $12 billion on behalf of defrauded investors and consumers. Their team, stepped in expertise covering antitrust, corporate governance, shareholder rights, consumer protection, and data privacy law, is at the forefront of legal excellence.

However, even giants face challenges. Labaton Sucharow found itself grappling with the intricacies of mass arbitration and class action lawsuits, often involving a multitude of clients. The hurdles were clear—efficient user onboarding, streamlined complaint handling, and effective client communication. The manual process of engaging with thousands of clients, each with specific questions and often requiring the exchange of sensitive information, proved not only time-consuming but also financially taxing.

To drive their growth and handle even larger cases, Labaton Sucharow recognized the imperative to innovate. They reached out to Icreon to develop an automated and scalable approach to client onboarding and communication. One that ensures a secure and personalized experience for each client, ultimately aligning with their commitment to legal excellence.

An Automated Platform Built for Precise Mass Arbitration Management

The Challenge: Onboarding and Managing Communications with Thousands of Clients

The organization serves as a critical intermediary, facilitating resolutions between consumers and corporations, including banks, tech companies, automakers, and private utilities. For example, if a pharmaceutical company produces a drug causing consumers harm, then those consumers seeking compensation can turn to the Labaton Sucharow. On behalf of those consumers, Labaton Sucharow will assess the case's validity, gather similar cases for credibility, and initiate discussions with the manufacturer. If an out-of-court settlement fails, the organization’s attorneys begin the process of preparing legal complaints, including document collection.

Before seeking assistance from Icreon, Labaton Sucharow grappled with operational challenges associated with managing client interactions at such a large scale. Despite having an in-house team dedicated to managing client communications, the process was extremely manual, labor intensive, and costly. 

The Solution: Automation and Scalable Personalization Mass Arbitration & Class Action Lawsuit Cases

When the law firm came to Icreon, their existing business model lacked a centralized platform for capturing and analyzing customer data, which was costing the organization a considerable amount of time and money. After Icreon comprehensively reviewed the organization’s current practices and developed a thorough understanding of the ADR (alternative dispute resolution process), they suggested an automated solution, the Mass Arbitration Platform. This solution enabled the law firm to efficiently manage arbitration from client onboarding to final settlement on a mass scale.

After a thorough analysis, Icreon was able to identify a multilayered automation stack for this leading law firm, which included AMP (accelerated mobile pages). By implementing AMP as a solution, the organization completely streamlined its client onboarding process from sign-up forms to retainer agreements and case validation. With this automatic system in place, this advanced technology can quickly assess predefined criteria to determine whether a person qualifies for a case filing. This automation facilitates handling cases in bulk, even dealing with over 100,000 consumers seeking assistance in cases of corporate wrongdoings. Within this context, the platform offers a tag management system to categorize consumers based on predefined criteria.

To increase traffic across digital portals, Icreon team integrated a customized plugin that collects user databases from organization’s partner law firms. These integrated and personalized automation workflows were key to addressing the challenges of manual case processing and managing consumer profiles in a secure environment.

The Result: Slashing 60 Hours of Manual Work to 4, Simplifying Case Processing

Icreon's team introduced an automated Mass Arbitration Platform to replace the manual ADR process. This change enabled the organization to process cases and communicate with clients more efficiently, resulting in an increased total number of cases filed. The labor involved in client onboarding, client communications, and case data analysis has been significantly reduced, now requiring only 4 hours of labor for every 60 hours originally needed. That represents a 93 percent increase in efficiency and huge reduction in labor costs.

The platform introduced features like tag management, database management, 3rd party data retrieval, dynamic reporting, and more. Launched in January 2021, it helped the law firm acquire 10,000 active clients within a year, and they now have over 500,000 clients in their database. Now the case creation time has reduced from 15-20 minutes to 10 seconds and to perform exposure check it takes just 1 min which was 15 mins to 8 hours (per case) earlier. Overall, the digital transformation has significantly driven the organization’s growth and reduced cost.

Automating a Manual Process to Perform Loss Analysis

The Challenge: Simplifying Data Collection and Loss Analysis for Client Investments in Stocks and Bonds

The law firm specializes in loss analysis for large companies and individuals by monitoring and analyzing daily stock portfolios involving thousands of trades. To initiate the analysis, the team gathers client financial data and creates class action lawsuits based on the data feeds to determine if any of their clients held stock during relevant events. 

For example, consider a situation where a company like XYZ tweets about a collaboration, leading to an expected increase in its stock price. Some entities or individuals invest in XYZ's stock based on this expectation. However, when the anticipated spike doesn't occur, these investors incur losses. Identifying and analyzing these losses is the organization’s responsibility.

Previously, the organization used a manual process for data analysis. Collecting data and then uploading it to an outdated system was done manually. The team had to sift through the uploaded data and run manual programs to identify any stock matches with ongoing class action lawsuits. Once an issue was identified with the client's stock during the relevant time, they performed a loss analysis.

Essentially, this analysis involved examining purchases and sales during the class period, which is the time of the lawsuit. If significant losses were detected, they pursued these as part of the larger class action lawsuit. The organization’s challenge was that many client transactions were often comprised of thousands of records, making the manual process time-consuming. They had to download thousands of files and then wait hours for the data to be processed.

The Solution: Developed Portfolio Analytics and Intelligence Engine using RPA to provides meaningful loss analysis insights

The organization recognized the need for automation to reduce costs and save time. The Icreon team introduced PAIGE, the Portfolio Analytics & Intelligence Generation Engine, to enhance their existing loss analysis model. PAIGE utilizes advanced technologies like RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and 3rd party integrations to streamline manual processes such as creating new cases, downloading files and uploading data.

With PAIGE in place, the system can generate reports, distinguish between records for clients and app users, and flag missing or mismatched information. This automatic workflow allows the team to easily conduct loss analysis using specific data points and criteria. Overall, PAIGE has expanded the organization’s loss analysis capabilities with its user-friendly and automated approach. Its key features include speed, consistency, and the capability to optimize workplace processes. The application is fueled by technological innovation, which has enabled the organization to expand and scale at an unprecedented rate.

The Result: 100% Accuracy and Efficiency Achieved with RPA Automation Solution

Icreon’s partnership with the legal firm streamlined client loss analysis process in stock trading and investments. Tasks that previously required three or four individuals for data collection and system uploads can now be handled by a single person using the PAIGE application. This automated workflow has expedited the process while reducing time to calculate loss from 2 hours-1 week (per case) to 2 mins, delivering accurate and efficient results that are aligned with the organization’s automation goals.