eDiscovery Daily Blog
It’s Friday at 5 and I Need Data Processed to Review this Weekend – eDiscovery Humor
We’ve referenced Ralph Losey’s excellent e-Discovery Team® blog several times before on this blog – it’s a great read and you won’t find a blog that gets more in depth than his does (he has also been gracious enough to participate in our thought leader interview series for the last three years). And, as Ralph has demonstrated before, he has a sense of humor when it comes to electronic discovery.
In his latest post, Are You The Lit Support Tech?, Ralph takes a humorous look at “what it is like on a Friday afternoon in the Litigation Support Departments of most law firms”. Or so it seems sometime. Like before, Ralph used XtraNormal to make the video. XtraNormal enables you to make an animated movie by selecting your animated “actors”, type or record your dialogue, and select a background. The “actors” sound a bit robotic if you type the dialogue, but that just adds to the humor as the pronunciations and inflections are rather humorous.
Anyway, the video involves a law firm partner coming to the lit support tech on a Friday afternoon and asking for help to process data for ten custodians so that he can review over the weekend as the production is due Monday. “When did you receive the request?”, asks the tech. “30 days ago”, says the partner, “Why?”. “No reason”, says the tech.
The video continues with the partner telling the tech not to worry “it’s only 15 gigabytes…not such a big number”. When the tech says that it’s over a million pages and he will have to process it and load it into their review platform, the partner says “I don’t have time for all the processing and stuff, just print it out and load it in my car.”
OK, so part of the humor is that it’s a bit farfetched (hopefully). Ralph notes that because he no longer has to supervise a litigation support department (because Jackson Lewis outsources all of its nonlegal electronic data discovery work), his “Friday afternoons are much nicer”.
It’s the vendor that has to deal with these last minute requests. At CloudNine Discovery, we can relate to the lit support tech who receives 15 gigabytes (or even more) on a Friday afternoon to process for weekend review – we get those types of requests more often than you think and our staff often works late Fridays to get the client’s data ready. It goes with the territory. So, we don’t make big plans on Friday night so that you can enjoy yours!
So, what do you think? Have you had to deal with last minute eDiscovery requests? If so, how do you handle them? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
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