Principal
Jane Gennarelli assists law firms in developing and implementing best practices for handling litigation discovery materials. She is the author of the Magellan's Law Litigation Best Practices in a Box™ product.
Over the years, Jane has worked with hundreds of law firms and thousands of litigators, legal assistants, and litigation support managers. She has helped about one-third of the NLJ Fifty law firms to implement best practices. In recent years, she has extended her focus to small and mid-sized law firms, helping them to develop big-firm capabilities on small-firm budgets.
Jane is perhaps best known for the classes she conducts. Her classes in discovery project management, marketing of in-house litigation support departments, and career development for litigation support professionals have received rave reviews. In the past year, she has conducted open classes in major cities across the country, private classes for some of the nation's largest law firms, webinars for groups of fifty to one hundred attendees, and small workshops for a variety of regional professional associations.
History
Jane has been working in litigation information management since 1978.
She began her career in the legal department of an international telecommunications company, as a team member responsible for selecting documents to be produced in antitrust litigation. In 1980 she went to work for a major vendor of litigation support services, as a project manager responsible for effective management of coding and image capture projects.
In 1985 she joined J. Feuerstein Systems (JFS), then a small litigation support consulting and project management firm. There, as a Project Director and later as Vice President of Consulting Services, she worked directly with law firm and law department clients to design and manage a wide variety of major litigation projects.
As a consultant with JFS, Jane also developed a "pilot project" process for helping clients to develop and apply case plans and best practices to specific families of litigation. Under this approach, Jane would lead the litigation team in a one or two day case planning meeting that would develop a complete information management plan for the case, including general processes and a database design. The goal was to walk the team through a planning process that they could later apply themselves to new cases.
Jane also worked with large firms to define and apply practice-wide best practices that suited each firm's mix of cases and its organizational structure and culture.
As a consultant, Jane has met with hundreds of law firms and thousands of litigators, legal assistants and litigation support managers. She has learned first hand what litigators need, how they approach their work, what things work well, and where things go wrong. That broad exposure forms the basis for her current Best Practices work.
In September of 2000, Jane left JFS to continue her career as an independent consultant and then, in 2003, to form Magellan's Law.