Client Spotlight
Shawn J. Wanta, Baillon Thome Jozwiak & Wanta LLP
How Shawn J. Wanta uses technology to discover and fix drafting errors
Company overview
Baillon Thome Jozwiak & Wanta LLP is an employment and consumer protection law firm based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It’s a nine-lawyer team of experienced trial lawyers who have earned a reputation for achieving outstanding results. The lawyers are dedicated advocates and who work tirelessly to secure justice for their clients. The firm is unique in that, despite providing legal services to clients on a contingency-fee basis, Baillon Thome Jozwiak & Wanta LLP lawyers invest personal attention to every aspect of each case. The firm’s business model is not about high-volume litigation, rather, the firm is committed to treating each matter and each person as unique, deserving of individualized, customized work.
The challenge
Produce flawless, bespoke work product within a small team.
The solution
Use technology to discover and fix drafting errors including language usage and style, formatting errors, and inconsistencies.
A Partner’s Second Set of Eyes
Shawn is a founding partner of Baillon Thome Jozwiak & Wanta LLP and he leads the firm’s class action and complex litigation practice group. Shawn has consistently been named a Super Lawyers Rising Star in class actions/mass torts since 2012 and has served as lead counsel in national class cases.
He embodies the firm’s commitment to zealous, yet principled, advocacy and treating every client with compassion and respect. To Shawn, every client, every case, and every document is important and unique. To meet his client service goals, Shawn works closely with support staff on class action cases. He’s a stickler for the details of the Bluebook and legal writing guides.
Individual Attention Within a Small Team
A small team allows every player to be personally involved in the case, but it requires efficiency and consistency to execute complex litigation effectively. Shawn needed to find a way to maintain a high standard without expending additional human resources.
At Baillon Thome Jozwiak & Wanta LLP, the firm prides itself on not merely “processing forms.” Instead, it provides bespoke drafting, research, and strategy for every matter. That requires spending quality time on every matter. When team members take extended leave, it creates strain on every aspect of the role. Every moment spent proofreading is time that isn’t being spent on the bespoke services that clients expect. Shawn was specifically looking for software to automate the proofreading and editing process when he found PerfectIt. Now he runs PerfectIt multiple times during drafting and while making major revisions.
“
PerfectIt gives me peace of mind because it finds more than any lawyer can with a manual review. It helps to ensure we have a polished, consistent look and feel that shows a high level of professionalism to courts, opposing counsel, and clients.
Shawn Wanta
Partner
“
It’s one of the pieces of software that allows us to accomplish the same things as bigger firms without having the bodies. We don’t have the luxury of having a word processing department or having someone who can proofread every document that goes out the door.
Shawn Wanta
Partner
An Expanding Team
As Baillon Thome Jozwiak & Wanta LLP grows, the demand for quality and consistency remains the firm standard. The expansion of any team creates new possibilities for inconsistencies. This is where software can help: team members use the same ABA style guide rules built-in to PerfectIt to ensure that documents follow the same standards.
Future Plans
It’s important for the firm’s brand that all documents have a uniform look and feel, even when they’re written by different people. But that’s tough to do without a large team to manage it. After migrating to Office 2016, Shawn hopes to roll PerfectIt out to the entire firm.
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