One of the best practices in Legal Project Management (LPM) is demonstrating to the legal teams how we techies can add value. We were having a team meeting related to a case that had a large document database in Relativity. The legal team had several concurrent sub-projects for this matter. The attorneys were teamed up to resolve…
One of the terms we use in litigation support is “coding”. Coding refers to putting information into database fields (which we refer to as “populating”) manually, one document at a time. There are some service providers that provide this service. They have a room full of “coders”. We pay them per document to complete the…
After the subpoena is received, there is a constant stream of activity between the attorneys, the client in-house counsel and the opposing counsel. Litigation Support should be involved at some level during this stage. The attorneys will discuss the subpoena requests with the client and begin to identify potential people (custodians) that will be able…
At the beginning of a litigation matter, a subpoena is received. The official name is Subpoena Duces Tecum. In addition to a subpoena from a government entity, there might also be an accompanying document referred to as a “Civil Investigative Demand (CID)” or a “Request for Information or Assistance“. A litigation support professional should always request a…
One of the first steps taken in a litigation matter is to put in place a “legal hold” with the client. It might also be referred to as a “litigation hold”. When it comes to electronic discovery, this is one of the most important steps and it must not be overlooked. Litigation matters always take…
When collecting documents in a litigation case, there can be electronic documents as well as hardcopy documents. Most of the time the hardcopy documents will be sent to a vendor to scan into a TIFF format that can easily be added to a document review database. The hardcopy documents will most likely include staples, paper…
I am sure you have heard of the expression, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. Well, I believe that expression should apply to litigation support professionals. In many of the cases we work on, we are exchanging production data with opposing counsel or we are sharing production data with co-counsel….
As a litigation support professional, one of our responsibilities is to make sure we understand the Do’s and Don’ts of dealing with electronic discovery. One of the issues we need to keep an eye on is Spoliation. Electronic documents collected, reviewed and produced in a litigation matter need to stay in the original condition throughout…
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…
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…
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…
Even though there is a large focus on electronic discovery in the litigation support industry, we can’t forget about the hardcopy documents that are collected during the discovery process. We usually end up scanning and OCRing the hardcopy documents and then loading the corresponding data into a review database. The attorneys can then search the OCR text and view…
One of the terms we use when working with electronic discovery is the term “custodian”. To those outside of our industry, it can sound like a misleading formal word which can sometimes confuse a newbie. At the beginning of an electronic discovery matter, the attorneys will work closely with the client to identify key witnesses…
When working with electronic discovery, there are a few terms that may seem very similar in name that we use in Litigation Support to describe electronic documents. They may also appear to overlap with each other because they actually do overlap in some ways. As I’ve mentioned before, in order to keep conversations about the data…
In working with people new to electronic discovery, one of my favorite questions I always get asked is “what is an e-mail family?” When I hear the question, I chuckle and realize (once again) that it has been so long since I first started using the term that I don’t think much about it when…
There are many terms that we use when working with electronic discovery. This term relates to the e-mail data. A conversation that takes place within an e-mail application is referred to as an “e-mail chain” or an “e-mail string” or an “e-mail thread”. The very first e-mail in a conversation is the beginning of the…
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