Beth Adams practices commercial litigation and arbitration at leading global law firm Jones Day, with a particular focus on fraud, insolvency, and antitrust disputes for a range of clients including insolvency practitioners and high net worth individuals.
What do dispute resolution lawyers do?
Dispute Resolution teams tend to focus on litigation (e.g. pursuing or defending claims issued through the courts) and investigations (e.g. helping companies to respond to investigations initiated by public bodies such as HMRC, the Competition and Markets Authority and the Serious Fraud Office), although they may also be involved in negotiating and documenting settlement agreements and attempting to prevent conflicts arising in the first place. These matters might span a broad range of issues relating to, for example, regulatory compliance, product or personal liability, media-related claims (e.g. defamation claims), insurance disputes and commercial fraud.
Contentious matters can require disputes lawyers to review huge volumes of documents to ascertain what has been going on and to try to find evidence to support the arguments, claims or defences that they wish to raise. Disputes lawyers might also need to draft court documents (e.g. witness statements, particulars of claim and appeals), produce reports setting out and justifying the findings of investigations, and create bundles of supporting evidence.
In a deal context, Dispute Resolution lawyers may be called in to assess potential liabilities that were identified during the due diligence process (e.g. if it transpires that the target is involved in on-going litigation). If their analysis suggests these outstanding liabilities could transfer to the buyer following the acquisition, the seller may be required to settle the matters before completion, grant additional contractual protections to the buyer, and/or lower the purchase price.
Alternative methods of dispute resolution
Litigation can be costly, time consuming, distracting and damaging to a company’s reputation. Accordingly, clients may initially prefer to pursue “alternative” dispute resolution methods such as arbitration, mediation and expert determination, as these are private and can be more flexible, quicker and cheaper than litigation. To that end, parties regularly include clauses in contracts stipulating that should disputes arise under those contracts, the parties are required to first try one or more methods of alternative dispute resolution before they can progress any claims through the courts.
As an aside, note that clients typically want to settle claims as early as possible, be that through reaching a settlement with the counterparty to a litigation claim, or, where wrongdoing has been discovered during an investigation, reaching a settlement with the body that initiated the investigation. Settling early can reduce legal fees, allow management teams to focus on their businesses and, perhaps most importantly, decrease the risk of incurring the reputational harm that can arise following public court hearings or long, in-depth investigations.
Why do trainees enjoy dispute resolution seats?
Some people particularly enjoy the contentious nature of litigation. This can involve building arguments based on legal research and factual analysis, discrediting the other side’s statements, and preparing for and attending court. Large, complex cases can go on for years, which may put off people who are more interested in working on a number of matters that resolve fairly quickly (i.e. corporate transactions), but such long-running matters can enable you to really get to know the client and the issues at hand. Some dispute resolution teams offer the opportunity to work on both litigation matters and investigations, which can offer a decent amount of variety. However, in larger firms, you may receive more administrative work as a junior in a contentious team compared to juniors in transactional teams.
Note that we cover the role of dispute resolution lawyers in the context of a transaction in our A law firm's role on a transaction case study.
In addition, our M&A course explains the types of risks that can arise in relation to transactions, and the mechanisms lawyers can use to mitigate these risks.