From Curveballs to Clarity: A Practical Guide to Effective Dispute Management

Illustration of a cog, with two arrows going in opposite directions

What does it take to manage disputes effectively in an era defined by a rapidly changing technological landscape, mounting commercial pressure on in-house legal teams to do more with less, and an increase in both the volume and complexity of the universe of potentially relevant documents? This is not an abstract question. For clients, proper management of a dispute can mean the difference between runaway costs and a controlled budget, between unwelcome surprises and well-managed expectations, and between missed opportunities and outcomes sharpened by clear process and strong coordination.

Technology evolves, the litigation landscape shifts, and client expectations rightly rise — but the fundamentals of excellent dispute management remain reassuringly constant. In this article, we explore what those fundamentals look like in practice, and how clients, outside counsel and business services professionals can function as a single, cohesive team to deliver real commercial value.

What does an effectively managed dispute look like?

First, an effectively managed dispute should be properly scoped and planned from the outset — as far ahead as is practicable given the inherent uncertainties of litigation — with costs monitored in real time against budgets and forecasts, and resourcing kept proportionate to the matter's size and complexity. Scope creep — the subtle accumulation of out-of-scope work — can erode trust just as surely as it does budgets, particularly if it appears uncontrolled or, worse, opportunistic. It should therefore be actively managed with the client: transparently, collaboratively and fairly. Contentious work also has a habit of producing curveballs outside a client's control, and those too require careful handling. We know that cost predictability and proactive communication rank among in-house legal teams' highest priorities when evaluating outside counsel. Striving to meet those expectations is not merely an afterthought — it is a core pillar of good matter management.

Second, a matter team's work should benefit from embedded best practice: the consistent application of tested processes that ensure quality and reliability across every engagement, whilst remaining sufficiently flexible to be meaningfully tailored to each matter.

Third, the client's particular requirements — their commercial priorities, risk appetite and preferred communication style and reporting format — should be genuinely understood and woven into everything the matter team does. The client who wants a crisp email summary rather than a formal advice memorandum, or the GC who needs a direct call before any written update reaches their board, should ideally not have to ask twice. All of this reinforces, for the client, the sense that they are part of one cohesive team with their external advisers.

How do we make this happen? People, process and technology

In the field of legal operations the three pillars of people, process and technology are essential for driving transformation and improving efficiency. It is a model that predates the current moment of generative AI, but it remains the right lens through which to assess what excellent dispute management requires. The emergence of dedicated legal project management (LPM) and legal operations professionals — sitting alongside lawyers rather than replacing them — has added rigour and fresh methodologies to what was previously left to individual lawyers' judgment and experience alone.

1. People

Commercial disputes vary enormously in their shape and demands — from the highest-value, multi-jurisdictional litigation to complex disputes where strategic significance far outweighs the headline damages figure, and from lengthy, multi-party proceedings to fast-moving investigations where speed is paramount. This makes it necessary to match the right level of resource and structure to each matter from the outset, and — crucially — to keep a close eye on how matters evolve, so that processes which serve a team well at one stage do not become sources of inefficiency at another.

The partnership between client, outside counsel and (where applicable) the barrister team should, ideally, feel like one extended team from the client's perspective. On the law firm's side, that team extends well beyond the lawyers conducting the substantive legal work. Our knowledge lawyers, legal operations, eDiscovery and legal technology professionals each play a distinct role in ensuring that matters run smoothly, efficiently and in a way that genuinely serves the client. By ensuring that these specialist functions are embedded in the case teams, we ensure that in-house counsel benefit from the scope of support that they may require.

We also find that allowing lawyers to focus on the substantive issues at hand, whilst equipping them with strong project management fundamentals, adds considerable value in practice. Our disputes lawyers are trained in the principles of LPM — meaning that every matter benefits from core LPM disciplines and the use of proprietary toolkits comprising checklists, protocols and templates that help the team progress work consistently and efficiently. For the most complex, high-stakes or time-critical matters, a dedicated legal project manager can provide an additional layer of structure and oversight — not as a substitute for lawyer judgment, but as a complement to it.

2. Process

Anyone with a focus on operational improvement will tell you: automate a poor process, and you simply arrive at a poor outcome more quickly. Effective matter management therefore requires smooth, well-designed underlying processes before any technology is layered on top.

Continuous improvement is central to achieving this. In our practice, it takes many forms — from structured matter debriefs run by our legal operations team at key milestones or at a matter's conclusion, to the more granular habit of asking associates to flag suggested refinements to standard process documents whilst those materials are fresh in their minds. Small improvements, captured consistently and embedded into future iterations of templates and protocols, compound over time into a meaningfully better service. When a client faces a type of dispute for the first time, part of the value they obtain from outside counsel is the benefit of years of accumulated experience in managing similar matters — and the firm's ongoing commitment to improving its processes in light of that experience.

Whilst emerging technologies can accelerate and enhance individual tasks, there is something that cannot currently be replicated algorithmically: the pattern recognition and contextual judgment that comes from having advised on and litigated similar matters across sectors and jurisdictions over many years. Law firms bring that institutional knowledge to every instruction, and it materially reduces risk for clients.

Client-side processes are equally important, and outside counsel team members must understand and incorporate those processes in order to function as a genuinely integrated client team.

3. Technology

The best results come from taking a deliberate approach to technology, including AI: the right tool selected for the right task, applied by people who understand both its capabilities and its limitations.

AI training is central to equipping lawyers to understand how the various tools work, where they add genuine value, and — equally importantly — where human judgment must remain in the driving seat. Our firmwide 'AI academy' training programme is designed to meet this need. In order to realise the benefits of available technology it is necessary to embed and empower engaged, curious and enthusiastic adopters within our legal teams and, in turn, this drives meaningful operational change.

We find it advantageous to have a strong team of in-house technologists. The legal technology team's focus is on extending and adapting the firm's existing suite of tools, whilst keeping a close eye on the market and developing new solutions where a genuine need exists. The team is therefore well placed to help our lawyers and clients navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of legal technology solutions. A key aspect of this support is to help lawyers get the most from Jylo, the firm's firmwide AI platform. Travers Smith is a proud customer of Jylo — a rapidly growing AI software company founded by the former AI team at Travers Smith — and as the platform continues to evolve quickly, the legal technology team continuously advise lawyers on how to harness its full potential.

A recent matter illustrates this well. AI was deployed for an iterative, targeted interrogation of a complex, mixed dataset — moving well beyond simple keyword searching or basic manual review. Using carefully engineered prompts and parameters, and incorporating structured feedback loops from lawyer reviews at each stage, the team was able to identify the relevant facts efficiently and reliably. A further iteration then produced a detailed, cross-referenced chronology in which every event was linked directly to the underlying source document — giving both the legal team and the client rapid, auditable access to original materials. Our eDiscovery team's involvement in the design and engineering of the phased review approach was central to both the quality of the output and the efficiency of the analysis. The exercise demonstrated something that we consider important: AI, deployed thoughtfully, does not diminish the role of experienced lawyers — it frees them to focus their judgment where it matters most.

Conclusion

The questions posed at the outset of this article — as to how to meet the challenges posed by AI, commercial pressure, and data complexity — are real, and they are not going away. But the answers are grounded in something enduring: a commitment to understanding what each client actually needs, building the right team around each matter, and maintaining the discipline to keep processes and technology genuinely in service of the work — rather than the other way around.

Disputes are, by their nature, somewhat unpredictable. The best matter management does not eliminate that unpredictability; it ensures that the team — client, outside counsel and barristers together — is positioned to respond to it with clarity, agility and confidence. That is what we believe effective dispute management looks like, and what we strive to deliver on every matter we handle.