Traditional and Nontraditional Litigation

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LAW/531

Traditional and Nontraditional Litigation
Introduction
According to "Lawsuit - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia" (2013), "Litigation is the process of taking legal action.” This litigation or legal process is most common in civil lawsuits. In litigation, there is a plaintiff, known as a complainer and a defendant. Every legal matter needs an attorney. In the essay below, I will review and discuss the traditional and non-traditional Litigation methods and the merits and demerits of each to the business organization.
Elements of traditional litigation
Pleading
Every legal document submitted in a lawsuit including complaint, petition, summons, declaration, and memorandum of points and authorities are called pleadings. Usually a lawyer drafts these pleadings. The process of pleadings may not take very long, but it is an important part of the trial process.
Pre-trial Discovery The discovery process in litigation is mandatory disclosure of information related to the litigation. Each party in a trial may exchange evidence and statements with the other party. Pre-trial discovery includes interrogatories, depositions, requests for admissions, and requests for production.
Trial and Judgment Trail is the process in lawsuit, in which one party takes another party to court. At the trial, each person presents witnesses and evidence in front of a judge, but without the presence of jury. Both parties must needs to waive the constitutional rights to a trial by jury. The judge then gets to decide matters of fact as well as matters of law.
Appeals
After a final judgment, either party or both may have a right to appeal in litigation to the higher court.
Risks associated with traditional litigation
Time Commitment Time taken from the initiation of the legal dispute till the judgment of the case is usually very long. Statistics indicates that this dispute s take a significant time and do not take an hour or day, but normally takes years or some time decades.
Adherence to legal procedures In the legal proceedings there are prescribed legal procedures, which has to be followed. Because of the intricacies in the legal dispute s business are limited to represent themselves in this legal dispute s and therefore have to hire an advisor.
Financial Commitment As legal matters are complicated, depending on the case matters there might be more than one litigator needed for the litigation. For this reason, it is a financial commitment for the business organization, which takes a thoughtful planning before starting a legal case. Consultation, researching the legal code, preparing documents and many more elements of legal disputes adds to the cost of the litigation to the business.
Risk of Negative Publicity When the company goes through litigation preceding the reputation and goodwill of the company gets impacted. Media is eager to publish such kind of details, which eventually becomes public knowledge and impacts the revenue and the public image of the business.
Limitation due to globalization Due to the globalization of business practices, legal disputes associated with the businesses are not limited to a geographical boundary. In certain situations legal matters become extremely complicated because of multiple languages, countries policies, legal procedures and culture barriers.
Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) as an