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Four Inefficiency Traps to Avoid in Your Legal Document Review Process

For every time-saving, cost-cutting efficiency available in legal document review lives an equal number of challenges and pitfalls which can consume your productivity and budget. For LSPs and law firms, a thorough and effective legal review will depend on more than just data size and solution speed. Navigating successfully through the review process means knowing where you can expedite and streamline your project with efficiency and how to avoid costly mistakes.

Read on to learn about four potential inefficiency traps you can avoid in your next legal review to save time and money:

  1. Document format and storage
  2. Inefficient upload speeds
  3. Duplicate data
  4. Single-user access to documents

Trap 1: Document Format and Storage

One of the first challenges to overcome is determining the best method to consolidate and convert collected data into searchable content. From digital emails and websites to printed letters and hand-written notes, different document formats are collected and stored across several disparate systems. While you may have some stored in Outlook, others could be kept in a binder on your desk.

A legal document review system digitizes and stores every document in one place, allowing you to search and review all documents at the same time. This enables you to apply a search strategy to locate relevant documents quickly and efficiently. It also provides you with the flexibility to view data in different, organized layouts to easily see document attributes such as:

  1. Source
  2. Type
  3. Origin date
  4. Author
  5. Recipients

With all case documents organized and stored on a single platform, LSPs and legal departments can locate and produce responsive content, ranging from scanned documents to email to spreadsheets and more.

Trap 2: Inefficient Upload Speeds

Initiating your review project will be determined by the speed of your initial data import. This phase can make or break the rest of your project timeline making it essential to start off strong.

Scheduling and staying within the time budgeted for your project will equally affect the efficiency of your whole team. The faster your team can scan and import documents, the faster you can start your document review.

While we can’t control your connection speed, we can manage the resources and technology on our platform to ensure the application performance is optimized for maximum efficiency.

Time equals money; having an eDiscovery tool capable of moving as quickly as you do allows you to work on the next step of your case faster.

Trap 3: Duplicate Data

Nearly 30% of email data is duplicated which directly impacts hosting costs if not removed prior to promotion for review.  Duplicate data occurs when the same file originates from multiple sources and in different formats.

For example, if you have two people engaged in an email exchange and both become custodians in a legal case, both sets of emails are collected for discovery. Now you have the same exchange from both people and you have to determine which set of emails you’re going to use. The complexity of duplicate data increases when the matter is shared across email distribution groups.

By cutting out duplicative documents, you save storage space and reduce the chance that two copies of the same document will be reviewed differently.

To prevent duplicate data from costing time and money, you need an eDiscovery tool to:

  • Centralize your data in one place
  • Eliminate duplicative data
  • Track how data is being reviewed in real-time
  • Prevent conflicting tags by different reviewers

Trap 4: Single User Access to Documents

Remote document review should be an easy and convenient option for you and your staff. However, documents still need to be digitized and uploaded to a shared system. This can be problematic for a number of reasons:

  • You don’t have anyone in the office to upload documents.
  • You don’t have the infrastructure in place to share working documents across multiple users at the same time.
  • You don’t have the ability to review, redact, and produce documents electronically without affecting the originals.

This forces the organization to spend time and money building new infrastructure. Or, they could use a private cloud-hosted system like CloudNine Review.

 

How CloudNine Review Helps You Avoid Inefficiency Traps

CloudNine Review is a safe, robust, and cost-effective solution that simplifies the eDiscovery review process and keeps you more productive.

We offer a single spot repository for all your discovery documents. Whether they are electronic or paper documents, you can load them into CloudNine Review to make them searchable. This allows you to access all the data at the same time giving you a consistent search strategy.

By utilizing a search strategy, you create an efficient way to review your data without wasting time by:

  • Showing search-term history
  • Filtering out previously reviewed documents
  • Setting up preview sets

With incredibly fast upload speeds on our end, installation is simple and straightforward. If there’s a slow connection speed on your end, we can help you identify the source of the problem while offering alternative solutions to upload heavy data loads.

To prevent duplicate data from slowing down your legal document review process, our processing engine detects duplicates and suppresses them before the data gets advanced for review.  Plus, all documents are hashed during the import process, so you can set up automation to identify and review specific documents from the searchable and reviewable records.

Hosted on a private cloud, CloudNine Review is a web-accessible, legal document review platform providing secure access to every approved member of your team. Every document is locked down so nothing can be deleted, altered, or sent to anyone without access. Even metadata like the author and timestamps are protected.

To protect sensitive or confidential data from being exposed, CloudNine Review will redact images of documents. Redacted files are copied and saved as a single-layer file so the redaction bars can’t be removed by outside parties.

 

CloudNine Review is designed to help your eDiscovery services be more efficient and productive.

To avoid the pitfalls of inefficiency traps, click banner below to request a free demo and see how CloudNine Review can help you today.

GDPR is Here! Is Your Law Firm Fully Prepared for It? Maybe Not: Data Privacy Trends

Unless you live under a rock, you know that the deadline for compliance with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has come and gone (it was May 25 – almost three weeks ago now).  So, does that mean your law firm is fully ready for it?  Based on the results of one survey, the odds are more than 50-50 that they’re not.

In Legaltech® News (Not Just Corporate: Law Firms Too Are Struggling With GDPR Compliance, written by Rhys Dipshan), the author covers a recent Wolters Kluwer survey which was conducted among 74 medium (26-100 staff members) to large (100-plus) law firms.  The result?  Less than half (47 percent) feel fully prepared to address the new GDPR requirements.  Another 16 percent of respondents said they were somewhat prepared and more than a third (37 percent) had made no specific preparations.

Barry Ader, vice president of product management and marketing at Wolters Kluwer, noted that part of the reason why many law firms were unprepared for GDPR was because they thought there would be an extension to the deadline. “Many of the law firms kind of half expected that there would be a delay, and they wouldn’t have had to solve the problem by May 25,” he said.  Ader also noted that the lack of preparation was also a sign that “law firms just don’t have the necessary skills, people, and budget to figure out how to handle GDPR.”

Other notable results:

  • Fewer than half of respondents (43 percent) had assigned a Data Protection Officer, a requirement of many organizations under GDPR. However, nearly 60 percent had assigned an individual, team or outside consultant to lead GDPR compliance efforts. And, approximately 72 percent of those surveyed were also investing in cybersecurity solutions due to the new regulation.
  • With regard to employee training on security, the survey found that only 43 percent of law firms conducted security and privacy training annually, while 24 percent had done training in the past three years. An additional 15 percent said that while they did not currently train employees, they were planning to do so in the near future. Amazingly, 17 percent of respondents did not conduct training and had no plans to train at all.

If you’re a client of a law firm, you may want to check to see if your firm can demonstrate full preparedness for GDPR.  If you believe this survey, chances are greater that they can’t do so than they can.

So, what do you think?  Is your organization fully prepared for GDPR?  Please let us know if any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Sponsor: This blog is sponsored by CloudNine, which is a data and legal discovery technology company with proven expertise in simplifying and automating the discovery of data for audits, investigations, and litigation. Used by legal and business customers worldwide including more than 50 of the top 250 Am Law firms and many of the world’s leading corporations, CloudNine’s eDiscovery automation software and services help customers gain insight and intelligence on electronic data.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Law Firm Sues Insurer Over $700K in Lost Billings Due to Ransomware Attack: eDiscovery Trends

Ransomware attacks, and what to do about them is one of the topics we’ll be discussing at our webcast on Wednesday, May 31.  For more info on where to register, click here.

A small Rhode Island law firm has filed a lawsuit against its insurance company after the insurer refused to pay $700,000 in lost billings following a ransomware attack on the firm that locked down the firm’s computer files for three months.

According to the Providence Journal (‘Ransomware’ locks down prominent Providence law firm, written by Katie Mulvaney), Moses Afonso Ryan Ltd. is suing its insurer, Sentinel Insurance Co., for breach of contract and bad faith after it denied its claim for lost billings over the three-month period the documents were frozen last year by the so-called “ransomware” attack.

According to the suit, Moses Afonso Ryan’s computers became infected with the ransomware virus last year as a result of a lawyer clicking on an email attachment. The virus disabled the firm’s computer network, along with all of the documents and information on the network. As a result, lawyers and staffers “were rendered essentially unproductive,” according to the suit.

The firm ultimately agreed to pay the cybercriminals the $25,000 ransom in bitcoins, cyber currency that is virtually impossible to trace, to unlock its files.  However, the process took three months as the firm negotiated the terms, established a bitcoin account and had to re-negotiate the deal and pay additional bitcoins after the first set of decryption tools failed to work.

During this data seizure period, the firm alleges its 10 attorneys were left unproductive, resulting in a loss of $700,000 in billings to the firm.

In its answer to the complaint, Sentinel denies an unjustified refusal to provide coverage under the law firm’s business owner’s policy and says it has paid the law firm the policy maximum of $20,000 for losses caused by computer viruses, which are covered under a computers and media endorsement.  The insurer says it has no legal obligation to cover other ransomware losses. The firm’s loss in business income does not meet its policy requirements, according to Sentinel.

A copy of the suit filed by Moses Afonso Ryan and the answer filed by Sentinel are available from ABA Journal.

So, what do you think?  Do you know how to protect yourself from a ransomware attack?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Ransom Image Copyright © Touchstone Pictures

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

What Are the Biggest Challenges for Law Departments in 2016? This Report Has Some Answers: eDiscovery Trends

According to Consilio’s Law Department Benchmarking Report, a survey encompassing data from 119 company’s law departments ranging in revenue from 2 to 10 billion dollars which was released on Tuesday, over 50 percent of law departments find that increasing or changing regulatory requirements pose the biggest challenge in 2016.  That, and other, findings can be found in the report, which is now available.

The sixth annual survey aims to help general counsel (GCs) better understand the effectiveness of their operating processes and was conducted in partnership with The General Counsel Forum.  We covered last year’s survey here when it was issued by Huron Legal (which, as you probably know by now, was acquired by Consilio a couple of months ago).

As noted in Consilio’s press release announcement of the report, while 58 percent of law departments have an internal data-privacy program, just 21 percent take the same precautions with information shared externally when managing vendors. The lack of risk-assessment programs makes sensitive data vulnerable to hacking and other cyber threats.

“As security concerns become more commonplace, law departments are working to ensure proper data security measures are implemented to protect sensitive company information both internally and externally,” said Bret Baccus, managing director, Consilio. “We’re seeing more companies use objective, metrics-based measurements to assess outside counsel and other providers’ security capabilities. Those metrics are being used to select third-party vendors based on the risk level in sharing confidential information and data.”

Other highlights of the report include:

  • Spending continued to increase, although at a lower rate than the prior year – at 7 percent from 2014 to 2015 as compared to an increase of 2.2 percent from 2013 to 2014.
  • Law departments are becoming more sophisticated in spend management, with 67 percent of respondents using matter-level budgets and 74 percent having, or planning to implement, structured programs for conducting rate negotiations.
  • The top department initiative planned over the next three years was formalization of outside counsel performance review process (with 46 percent of respondents either already implementing or planning to implement within the next 2-3 years), followed by development of an enterprise information governance program (38 percent) and tracking of department metrics and performance indicators (36 percent).
  • As law departments look to effectively manage costs and workloads, many are more often outsourcing discovery work to non-law firm vendors. Over 75 percent of companies with over $10 billion in revenue reported using alternative service providers for document review and data processing/hosting, with 44 percent of companies between $2 and $10 billion reporting the same.
  • Discovery management programs are fairly common at the largest companies, but relatively few companies with revenue under $10 billion have them, even though for companies with any volume of litigation those programs can reduce risk by improving consistency and defensibility and save money by limiting the need to “reinvent the wheel” with each new case.

The highlights of the Law Department Benchmarking Report are available for download here.  For more information about the complete report, please contact Bret Baccus (bbaccus@consilio.com or 713‑222‑5910) or Jaime Woltjen (jwoltjen@consilio.com or 312-880-3737).

So, what do you think?  Are you surprised by any of these trends?  Please share any comments you might have with us or let us know if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

P.S. — Happy Birthday to my wife, Paige!  I love you honey!

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Legal Salaries on the Rise? That’s the Half of It: eDiscovery Trends

Robert Half, that is.

Robert Half’s 2016 Legal Salary Guide features salary ranges for more than 100 positions in the legal field and provides some other interesting statistics, as well.  According to the Guide, average starting salaries for lawyers at law firms are expected to increase 3.5 percent in 2016.  And, salaries for experienced litigation support and eDiscovery directors and managers are expected to rise even more than that.

The salary figures in the 2016 edition are based on a number of sources, most notably the thousands of full-time, temporary and project placements Robert Half’s staffing and recruiting professionals make each year. Here are some breakdowns:

  • Lawyers: Starting salaries for lawyers with 10-plus years’ experience are expected to increase 0 to 4.7 percent from 2015 (depending on the size of the firm). A lawyer with 10-plus years’ experience at a large firm (75+ lawyers) is expected to hit an average range of $194,250 to $279,500 annually.  First-year associates’ salaries are expected to increase 2.2 to 2.7 percent increase over 2015 projections.  Corporate in house counsel are expected to see average compensation gains of 2.2 to 3.7 percent over 2015 levels, with the more experienced in house counsel trending toward the top end of that range (average range of $185,250 to $259,750 annually).
  • Paralegals/Legal Assistants: Starting salaries for paralegals/legal assistants are expected to increase 0 to 4.0 percent from 2015. Senior legal assistants with 7+ years of experience are expected to make as much as $96,750 annually at large law firms.
  • Litigation Support/eDiscovery: Starting salaries for litigation support/eDiscovery directors and managers are expected to increase from 4 to 5.7 percent annually from 2015. The top end of the salary range for litigation support/eDiscovery directors with 10+ years of experience is $130,500.  Document coders also see an increase – 3.6 percent over 2015.

The guide also provides salary expectations for office managers, legal secretaries, legal specialists and contract and compliance administration positions for both law firms and corporate legal.  Not surprisingly, they’re all up.

Other notable statistics:

  • Lawyers’ top responses to the question “Aside from compensation or bonus, which of the following provides the best incentive for legal professionals to remain with a law firm/ company?” were as follows: Challenging work or variety of assignments (39 percent), Professional development opportunities (26 percent), Flexible work arrangements (20 percent).
  • 71 percent of lawyers said blended or hybrid paralegal/legal secretary positions are more common today than they were two years ago.
  • The top two practice areas that are expected to generate the greatest number of legal jobs in the next two years in the US are: Litigation (33 percent) and General Business/Commercial Law (26 percent).

The survey guide also provides an adjustment for various US cities across the country (obviously, salaries are much higher in New York (140 percent of the reported numbers for the different positions) than in Duluth, MN (79.6 percent).  For example, the top end of the salary range for litigation support/eDiscovery directors with 10+ years of experience in Houston (107.5 percent for my hometown) is actually $140,287 (just sayin’).  So, you can adjust the numbers based on local variances.  The guide even has a Canada section, eh?

The FREE 36 page PDF guide is available here.  Check it out.  Maybe you need a raise?

So, what do you think?  Do the numbers surprise you?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

eDiscovery Throwback Thursdays – How things evolved, part 3

So far in this blog series, we’ve taken a look at the ‘litigation support culture’ circa 1980, and we’ve covered how databases were built and used.  We’ve come a long way since then, and in the past couple of weeks we’ve discussed how things have evolved — we’ll continue that this week. First, though, If you missed the earlier posts in this series, they can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

In the past couple of weeks we’ve talked about the form in which document collections were stored and the evolution – first in paper form, then on microfilm, then microfiche, and then as digital images.  Database content has evolved too.  Early databases included coded information only.  In the mid 1980’s, litigation support professionals starting thinking about and talking about OCR (optical character recognition) technology, mostly because one of the main-stream litigation support vendors promoted the advantages of full-text databases.

The primary advantage was, of course, the availability of all words on a document for searching.  There was a price-tag though, because the starting point was still paper.  Text was captured in an OCR scanning process.  Like image technology, full-text took a while to catch on in our industry.  The biggest hurdle initially was a lack of confidence in the results – with good reason.  At the time, searching the internet wasn’t mainstream, so the average litigation team member wasn’t comfortable with employing a less-than-rigid search method.

In addition, search technology was less advanced than it is today, so there was a greater burden on the user to get a search right.  And, OCR technology wasn’t as advanced either, so there were a lot of errors in the scanning process – errors that affected search results. Over time, however, these things changed.  Average business people became more and more comfortable searching text (thanks in large part to Google); search technology advanced; and OCR technology advanced.

Eventually, including full-text in a database became the norm, and even started replacing coded information.  Another factor that contributed to the evolution of full-text was the cost to store data.  It used to be expensive.  I remember sitting in meetings where attorneys debated on things like using abbreviations and punctuation in databases because of the expense of storage – they looked for every way they could to cut down on the data that was stored.  As storage costs went down over the years, it became easier to justify including full-text in databases.

These changes — databases that included images and full-text, coupled with advanced search technology – made a huge change in how litigation databases were used.  Databases were no longer a ‘back-office’ tool – they were used directly by attorneys, and they provided attorneys with very, very fast access to their documents.  By the mid 1990’s litigation databases were not only main stream, but they were regularly portable.  Not only did attorneys have almost-immediate access to their documents – they had that access even when not in the office.

This brings us up to the 1990’s, at which point electronic discovery quickly emerged as the next big advancement.  I won’t cover the evolution of it in this series… CloudNine has documented that well here in its eDiscovery Daily Blog.

This post concludes the Throwback Thursday blog series. I hope you enjoyed this look back at the way things used to be in our industry!

Please let us know if there are eDiscovery topics you’d like to see us cover in eDiscoveryDaily.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

eDiscovery Blog Throwback Thursdays – How things evolved, Part 2

So far in this blog series, we’ve taken a look at the ‘litigation support culture’ circa 1980, and we’ve covered how databases were built and used.  We’ve come a long way since then, and in last week’s blog, we started discussing how things have evolved.  In the next posts, we’ll continue discussion of things evolved, but first, if you missed the earlier posts in this series, they can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Last week, I described the use of microfilm and microfiche to store document collections.  As most of you know, the next step in the evolution process was a move to storing documents as images.

This was a huge step in the world of litigation support, and honestly it was long overdue when it finally became adopted as a standard.  Like so many advancements, it was ‘looked at’ and ‘talked about’ for years before it became the norm.  One of the most significant hurdles was simply cost:  while the cost to scan documents to create images wasn’t much different than the costs to photocopy or film, image viewing technology was expensive.  Firms did not already have this technology, and corporate clients were not willing to bear the cost.  Eventually, however, it caught on.  By the late 1980’s more and more litigation teams were building databases with images.

There were other changes happening that helped this along – a couple of which meant using images only made sense:

  1. The use of computers in general was becoming more widespread.  Computers were no longer only used by large companies.  Small and mid-sized companies were using them.  PCs were introduced to the world so large main-frame computers and mini computers were not the only option. Desktop computers were becoming widespread.
  2. Because the use of computers was growing, more and more commercial software products were available, including commercial litigation support products.  Two of the first popular commercial products were Inmagic and BRS Search.

Because of these changes, technology use in law firms grew.  Law firms were buying computers for use by attorneys and paralegals.  Law firms started hiring IT staff.  Law firms started hiring litigation support professionals and buying litigation support software.  In short, law firms were developing internal resources to build and maintain databases.  They were creating an infrastructure that could support the use of images.

Including images in litigation support databases caused another shift in the way databases were used:  because the documents themselves were immediately available in a database, databases were being used more and more often directly by attorneys.  They were no longer a ‘back-office’ function.  For many years, it was common for law firms to have ‘walk-up’ litigation support stations, but these ‘walk-up’ stations were often used by attorneys, and eventually it became normal to see a computer on every desk in a law firm.

Tune in next week and we’ll continue discussion of how the litigation world circa 1980 evolved and got to where it is today.

Please let us know if there are eDiscovery topics you’d like to see us cover in eDiscoveryDaily.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

eDiscovery Throwback Thursdays – How Things Evolved

So far in this blog series, we’ve taken a look at the ‘litigation support culture’ circa1980, and we’ve covered how databases were built and used.  We’ve come a long way since then, and in the next posts I’m going to talk a bit about how things evolved.  But first, if you missed the earlier posts in this series, they can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Litigators who used databases circa 1980 – for the most part – recognized a significant improvement in efficiencies.  As technology and approaches evolved over time, more efficiencies were realized.

One of the first big changes in how we worked was the use of microfilm.  Paper documents were still photocopied and coded, but microfilm became the preferred mechanism for storing and retrieving documents.  While the technology had been around for quite a long time, the litigation projects I worked on used paper repositories up until the early 1980s, which is when microfilm started to become the standard. This approach offered multiple advantages, the most significant being:

  1. It dramatically reduced the amount of space required to store a document collection.  The documents for a large case could be stored in a box or two rather than in a room or two. This also meant that it was reasonable to have multiple copies of a document collection stored in offices convenient for the litigation team, rather than a single, central repository of documents.
  2. Attorneys still used central repositories to handle large document pulls, but with microfilm It was faster and easier to retrieve those documents — turnaround time was much better.
  3. It preserved the integrity of the document collection.  Once a collection was filmed, pages wouldn’t be lost, shuffled, or damaged.

So, what is microfilm and how does it work?  Micro-reproductions of document pages are stored on reels of film.  Here’s a picture:

 

Those reels are labeled with the inclusive document number range.  Now — when doing a document pull – instead of locating a box and pulling a document to photocopy, you would locate a reel, thread it on a microfilm reader (see picture above), scroll to the correct frame, and hit a print button.

This approach evolved even further, and we started using microfiche.  The principle was the same, but the film was stored on cards instead of reels:

 

The cards were stored in sleeves labeled with the inclusive document numbers, and the cards were inserted into a microfiche reader.

Let me point out that microfilm and microfiche are still in use today in many libraries around the country.  Most libraries are no longer ‘filming’ new documents (they’re using imaging technology), but many still have historic collections of newspaper and magazine articles stored on microfilm or microfiche.

Tune in next week — we’ll continue discussion of how the litigation world circa 1980 evolved and got to where it is today.

Please let us know if there are eDiscovery topics you’d like to see us cover in eDiscoveryDaily.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

eDiscovery Throwback Thursdays – How Databases Were Used, Circa Early 1980s, Part 5

So far in this blog series, we’ve taken a look at the ‘litigation support culture’ in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, we’ve covered how databases were built, and we started discussing how databases were used.  We’re going to continue that in this post.  But first, if you missed the earlier posts in this series, they can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

In last week’s post, we covered searching a database.  As I mentioned, searches were typically done by a junior level litigation team member who was trained to use the search engine.  Search results were printed on thermal paper, and that paper was flattened, folded accordion style, and given to a senior attorney to review – with the goal of identifying the documents he or she would like to see.  Those printouts included information that was recorded by a coder for each document.  A typical database record on a printout might look like this:

DocNo: PL00004568 – 4572

DocDate: 08/15/72

DocType: LETTER

Title: 556 Specifications

Characteristics: ANNOTATED; NO SIGNATURE

Author: Jackson-P

Author Org: ABC Inc.

Recipient: Parker-T

Recipient Org: XYZ Corp.

Copied: Franco-W; Hopkins-R

Copied Org: ABC Inc.

Mentioned: Phillips-K; Andrews-C

Subjects: A122 Widget 556; C320 Instructions

Contents: This letter incudes specifications for product 556 and requests confirmation that it meets requirements.

Source: ABC-Parker

The attorney reviewing the printout would determine (based on the coded information) which documents to review – checking those off with a pen.

The marked up printout was delivered to the archive librarian for ‘pulling’.  We NEVER turned over the original (from the archive’s ‘original working copy’).  Rather, an archive clerk worked with the printout, locating boxes that included checked documents, and locating the documents within those boxes. The clerk made a photocopy of each document, returned the originals to their boxes, and placed the photocopies in a second box.  When the ‘document pull’ was complete, a QC clerk verified the copies against the printout to ensure nothing was missed, and then the copies were delivered to the attorney.

In last week’s post, I mentioned how long it took for a database to get built.  Once the database was available for use, retrievals were slow, by today’s standards.  Depending on the number of documents to be pulled, it could take days for an attorney to get a stack of documents back to review.  While that would be unacceptable today, it was a huge improvement over the alternative at the time – which was to flip through an entire document collection eyeballing every page looking for documents of interest.  For example, when preparing for a deposition, a team of paralegals would get to work going through boxes of documents and eyeballing every page looking for the deponent’s name.

Working with a database then was – by today’s standards – done at a snail’s pace.  But the time savings at the time were significant.  And the search results were usually more thorough.  On one project I managed, just as the database loading was completed, an attorney called me to say he was preparing for a deposition and had his paralegals manually review the collection looking for the deponent’s name.  They spent a week doing it and found under 200 documents. He was uncomfortable with those results.  I told him the database was almost available – we just had to do some testing – but I could do a search for him.  I did that while he waited on the phone and quickly reported back to him that the database search found almost twice as many documents.  We delivered the documents to him within a couple of days.

Tune in next week and we’ll cover how the litigation world circa 1980 evolved and got to where it is today.

Please let us know if there are eDiscovery topics you’d like to see us cover in eDiscoveryDaily.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Litigation Support Tools of the Trade – eDiscovery Best Practices

If you have worked in litigation support for a number of years like I have, you start to assemble a toolkit of applications that help you get your job done more quickly and efficiently.  In her excellent Litigation Support Guru blog, Amy Bowser-Rollins (who was previously profiled on THIS blog) has recently published a series of posts that describe tools of the trade that she recommends to litigation support “newbies”.  Let’s take a look.

The entire series of 18 Tools of the Trade is available here.  Here are the specific tools that she covers:

  1. TextPad
  2. Snagit
  3. Unstoppable Copier
  4. Concordance CPL to convert DAT to DCB
  5. Bulk Rename Utility
  6. TrueCrypt
  7. FileZilla
  8. Beyond Compare
  9. Dan Biemer Concordance CPLs
  10. Tableau
  11. Avery DesignPro
  12. UltraEdit
  13. FTK Imager (also previously discussed on our blog here, here, here, here and here)
  14. Directory Lister Pro
  15. iConvert
  16. Hard Drive SATA/IDE Adapter
  17. 7-Zip
  18. AutoCAD Viewer

Whether you need to edit large text files, perform screen captures, copy or rename files, manipulate data for Concordance, encrypt data for transfer, FTP data using an intuitive interface, capture data from a drive without spoliating evidence, create CD labels, convert load files, compress file collections or view engineering drawings, there is an application for you.  I personally use many of these frequently, including TextPad, Snagit, TrueCrypt, FileZilla, Beyond Compare, FTK Imager and iConvert.

Several of these applications are free.  Most are at least inexpensive.  They are vital “tools of the trade” for litigation support professionals.  Kudos to Amy for a terrific blog series!

So, what do you think?  What “tools of the trade” do you have in your litigation support “tool belt”?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.