Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs, LLP has for many years, in all of its offices, maintained an active personal injury and insurance defense practice.  We have been retained by a number of different insurance companies to handle cases, as well as representing a variety of self‑insured corporations in their defense work.  The types of cases we have handled have run the gamut from minor personal injuries to major disasters involving multiple death and serious injuries.  In the latter we have served as lead counsel in building fires involving hundreds of deaths, coal mine disasters, and airplane crashes.

While we have experience in assembling a team approach to the major disaster matters, we also realize that in the case of less serious injuries a more economical approach is necessary to achieve an objective of properly defending and settling a case without excess litigation expense.  Such an approach involves evaluation of cases at an early stage to determine which cases should be litigated, all with an eye toward the most economical management of the defense.  Under these circum‑stances, economical management often means the lowest total cost when both litigation costs and travel costs are combined.

Our experience in this sort of management includes representation on a state‑wide basis of a large asbestos producer involving hundreds of claims with a goal toward the most economical processing and disposal.  In another matter we presently perform litigation management services for a client that is a target of thousands of product liability claims in eight different states.  Over 1,000 complaints representing the claims of about 7,000 plaintiffs have already been filed in that matter, where we assist our client in locating local counsel to handle individual cases, monitoring the work of these counsel and serve as coordinating counsel in order to insure consistency of discovery responses, legal positions and strategies.  We have the ability to create and maintain a computer data base in such a situation which permits the most effective method of sharing information, deposition transcripts and other analyses of testimony from the various cases.  We have also set up seminar meetings for these counsel in order to train them in the representation of the client.  For another client faced with products liability claims on a nationwide basis we operate a document control project that handles several million documents per year.  This involves organizing, microfilming and archiving all documents related to the litigation and preparing subjective abstracts and indices from the documents for a computer managed litigation data base.

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