A mass tort case is active in eleven states. Each jurisdiction has its own procedural rules, its own local counsel, and its own filing requirements. The lead firm is responsible for strategy and oversight across all of them. Local counsel in each state is responsible for appearances, filings, and compliance with local rules. Everyone understands their role. The problem is that understanding roles and actually coordinating across them are two different things.
Local counsel relationships are a necessary feature of complex, multi-jurisdiction litigation. They are also one of the most difficult coordination challenges faced by firms in leadership roles. At scale, the difficulty compounds. Managing local counsel across dozens of jurisdictions without losing visibility, control, or consistency is a problem that email and shared drives were never designed to solve.
Co-counsel on a complex matter typically shares significant context about the case. Local counsel often does not. Their role is intentionally constrained: handle what needs to be handled in their jurisdiction, comply with local rules, appear when required, and report back to lead counsel. That bounded role is appropriate. It is also exactly what makes coordination difficult.
Local counsel needs enough information to do their job correctly. They need current filings, current deadlines, and enough case context to avoid procedural missteps in their jurisdiction. What they do not need, and what lead counsel generally should not share, is the full strategic record of the matter: settlement analyses, internal assessments, privileged communications with the client, or work product prepared for other jurisdictions.
The challenge is drawing that line consistently and enforcing it in practice. When coordination happens through email and shared drives, that line is difficult to maintain. Files get forwarded. Threads get expanded. Someone adds a local counsel contact to a distribution list that carries more information than intended. The boundaries that were clear in principle become blurry in execution.
For a firm managing a handful of matters with one or two local counsel relationships, these challenges are manageable through careful attention. For a firm handling high-volume mass tort or class action litigation across many jurisdictions simultaneously, they are not.
Local counsel management at scale means tracking multiple relationships across multiple states, each with different contacts, different procedural requirements, and different levels of involvement in the matter. Lead counsel is accountable for everything that happens in every jurisdiction. That accountability does not diminish because a local firm is handling the day- to-day in a particular state. It means lead counsel needs reliable visibility into what local counsel is doing, what they have access to, and whether the matter in each jurisdiction is on track.
When that visibility depends on periodic check-in calls and email updates, gaps develop. Local counsel operates in relative isolation between communications. Lead counsel loses situational awareness. And when something goes wrong in a jurisdiction, the question of who knew what and when is hard to answer from a mailbox.
Lead firms tend to resolve the information access question in one of two ways, and both carry risk.
Over-sharing gives local counsel access to the full matter record for simplicity. It avoids the difficulty of deciding what to share and ensures that local counsel always has the context they need. The risk is that information local counsel does not need and should not have is now in their hands. That includes privileged communications, client confidences, and strategic work product that may be sensitive in ways that are not always obvious in the moment of sharing.
Under-sharing restricts local counsel to only what is actively sent to them, usually via email. It protects information but creates a different problem: local counsel may not have current deadlines, may be working from outdated filings, or may miss a development in the matter that is relevant to their jurisdiction. The risk here is not privilege. It is error, missed steps, and the kind of procedural misstep that creates liability for lead counsel.
Neither approach is adequate. What lead firms actually need is the ability to define access precisely, at the matter level, for each local counsel relationship.
Matter-level permissions make it possible to give local counsel exactly the access they need, and nothing more. Rather than choosing between full access and manual delivery, lead counsel defines a structured view for each local counsel relationship: the deadlines relevant to their jurisdiction, the filings they need to see, the contacts they need to reach, and nothing beyond that.
This approach resolves the over-sharing and under-sharing problem at once. Local counsel has current, reliable access to the information their role requires. Lead counsel retains control over what that information includes and can adjust it as the matter evolves. And because access is defined structurally rather than managed through ongoing email decisions, the risk of inadvertent disclosure drops significantly.
The most immediate operational benefit of structured access for local counsel is deadline and filing alignment. In litigation coordination across jurisdictions, the cost of a missed deadline or a filing discrepancy is rarely absorbed quietly. Courts notice. Clients notice. Lead counsel is accountable.
When local counsel works from a shared, current view of the matter, aligned with what lead counsel sees, the conditions for that kind of error are substantially reduced. Everyone is working from the same schedule. Filings are visible as they happen. Updates do not require a call to propagate.
Clarra’s law firm collaboration platform gives lead counsel the tools to structure local counsel access at the matter level, share deadlines and filings in real time, and maintain oversight across jurisdictions without relying on email chains and periodic check-ins to keep everyone aligned.
Schedule a demo to see how Clarra supports local counsel management across complex, multi-jurisdiction litigation portfolios.
