Many litigation support professionals are processing electronic discovery at a service provider (or in-house) and then loading the data into a Concordance database. When an attorney begins to review the documents, one of the first things they want to do is sort the documents in date order. If they simply sort the entire database on…
When I first started in litigation support, the workload was fairly light and there was still uncertainty as to what services a litigation support professional would offer to the legal teams. As the years passed, the workload increased and the team grew. Several years after litigation support became a recognized role, the workload would either…
It is inevitable that you will have a bad day in litigation support. Bad days in litigation support can be a little different than other careers. Since the job includes many roles within a day and we have so many people relying on us, there can be a variety of ways that things don’t go…
Name: Mike McDonald Location: Cleveland, Ohio What kind of work were you doing before litigation support found you? I transferred into litigation support from my role as a paralegal. My college degree is in audio production. Prior to entering the legal industry I worked as an audio engineer and had the obligatory stints as waiter…
With the increasing concerns related to data security and privacy issues across many industries, the legal industry has been forced to implement security around the transfer of electronic discovery collected in litigation matters. Hard drives, thumb drives and DVDs alike, many litigation support professionals are encrypting the data prior to transfer. The government contractors in…
One of the services we provide as a litigation support professional is the role of User Support. We are inundated at times with telephone calls or e-mails from users asking for help. One type of question that we receive on a regular basis relates to software support. The user is trying to perform some steps…
In litigation support, when we learn of a new matter, one of the first questions we ask is whether the e-mail that will be collected is in Outlook format. The reason we ask this question is because the second most popular e-mail format is Lotus Notes. Some companies are still using Lotus Notes for their…
In terms of electronic discovery data, most of the e-mail we deal with comes from Microsoft Outlook. The server version of Outlook is called Microsoft Exchange. The client version is called Microsoft Outlook. Since most businesses are using Outlook in their course of business, we end up collecting Outlook data files most of the time…
Name: Julie Carmona Location: Columbus, Ohio What kind of work were you doing before litigation support found you? I was a trial paralegal for about 13 years. How did you get the opportunity to join the litigation support community? I moved to Columbus, Ohio in 2003 from Dallas, Texas and I had the opportunity to…
I have been working in litigation support a long time and one of the interesting things about the field is where the firm or service provider decides to locate the litigation support team. For years, our team was located near the Records Department and our team had cubicle workstations in one room with no windows….
Last week, the Washington DC office of the law firm of Cleary Gottlieb opened its doors to entry-level litigation support candidates. A few weeks earlier, I was contacted by Alex Billeb, the Practice Administrator at Cleary. She encouraged me to attend the event and she asked me to invite any of my students that might…
One of the tasks that fill our day in litigation support is what I like to call “manipulating data”. One of the ways we need to manipulate data is by renaming a list of files. There are a number of scenarios where this renaming task needs to be completed, but the most obvious would be…
Technology and the practice of law are intertwined now. There is no going back. Attorneys are consistently being put in the position of having to explain to their clients the steps that need to take place (and the associated costs) with regard to the electronic documents before we can produce documents in the matter. The…
Name: Jere W. Wilson Location: Hartford, CT What kind of work were you doing before litigation support found you? My entire career has been in various aspects of the IT field. After working in the industry as an employee for nine years, I started my own IT consulting company. I did that for 20+ years…
Running a litigation support department can be similar to being an entrepreneur. Many of the managerial aspects are the same. There is definitely a marketing component for both. Providing excellent service to our clients is not any different than running a business and retaining clients. There are even some litigation support service providers that are…
Name: Nancy Merreot Location: Washington, DC What kind of work were you doing before litigation support found you? Network Administration and Website Development How did you get the opportunity to join the litigation support community? I was hired to do software development and third-level support for all core applications at a law firm in Cleveland….
In litigation cases, one of the primary reasons for creating document databases is so that we can gain the ability to search across all of the documents. Paralegals, attorneys and litigation support professionals will all perform database searches. Service providers will also perform searches at the request of their client. When the searches are conducted,…
When boxes of documents arrive at the firm, the paralegal will literally hold those boxes hostage until at least one set of photocopies is made. The photocopy set is often referred to as “the working set” because it is then given to the attorneys to review, organize, mark up, or do whatever they need to…
At the beginning of this month, I attended another litigation support mentoring panel at Georgetown University. One of the questions that a student asked of the panel was “What is a typical day for someone in litigation support? We answered the question by naming a few tasks that might typically fill our day. About a…
Name: Chris McDowell Location: Austin, TX What kind of work were you doing before litigation support found you? Between my honorable discharge from the USMC in 1997 (Security forces/Infantry) and my first litigation support position in 2004, I worked in corporate security administration, in the operations department of a route delivery software company and finally…
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