Third-Party Subpoenas Cost Companies Big Money... This Helps Them Carve Some Of That Back

This article by Joe Patrice, a senior editor at Above the Law, dated August 18, 2021, looks at something most people rarely think about: institutions, often third parties, routinely asked for mundane documents, such as banks subpoenaed for customer bank records or a large employer asked to produce employment information in a divorce case. It describes how Safari SOP aims to help legal departments streamline the response process and recoup their money along the way.

Key points

• These requests don't require outside counsel, but they are time-consuming projects for small legal departments to constantly deal with. Many legal departments don't get reimbursed, because collecting on every low-value request can be more trouble than it's worth.
• In the Red Robin example the article quotes, every step was manual, including drafting routine correspondence and declarations. The team recorded progress in spreadsheets, stored response documents in network drive folders, kept paper copies of productions, and shipped a FedEx package for each response, with no time to invoice and pursue cost recovery.
• The article estimates that at $100 per response, the cost runs into millions for Fortune 25 entities fielding hundreds of thousands of these requests a year.
• Safari SOP automates the process: intake of subpoenas via a registered agent feed, templates for all stages of the process, tracking of the subpoena's lifecycle in a central location, and delivery of the data through a secure online data portal.
• Safari SOP estimates that its process saves customers 30-45 minutes per request and recovers $100 each time.
• Bringing the whole process under one roof gives law departments key data about what requests they are getting and which areas of the company are getting them, data that can be deployed to streamline other processes.

Common questions

How many of these requests does a company get?

A small bank may get 500 of these requests a year, for divorce cases, bankruptcy, law enforcement requests, collection actions, and personal injury, according to Rob Thomas, Safari SOP's VP of Strategic Development. A Fortune 25 company could get 125,000 a year. He compares not recouping costs on every small request to a leak in a plumbing system: a constant drain.

How does Safari SOP make sure the requesting party pays?

The parties seeking the data have to clear a paywall to access the secure online portal, which the article says guarantees no lawyer can skip out on the obligation to reimburse.

Who is behind Safari SOP?

Safari SOP was founded by core team members behind Serengeti, the e-billing company later acquired by Thomson Reuters.