Discovery Litigation Support provides assistance to attorneys in civil cases, including traditional paper document support and electronic discovery (e-discovery). Consultants offer manpower and software systems to manage the overwhelming process of document production. They specialize in either traditional or ESI litigation support, creating an electronic database and organizing documents into evidence appropriate for trial. This lowers overall costs and allows attorneys to easily find supporting information.
Discovery Litigation Support is the assistance provided by outside counsel to attorneys involved in the production of documents in civil cases. It includes the types of supports traditionally provided for paper documents and the more recently developed support systems for the discovery of electronic correspondence and documents, known as electronic discovery (e-discovery). Litigation support consultants provide both manpower and software systems to help attorneys and law firms manage discovery.
The discovery process in civil cases can be overwhelming. One party has the right to request documents from the other party, but will rarely know in advance the exact documents needed to open a case. Discovery requests often search broad categories of documents in the hope that a meticulous review will find relevant material buried somewhere in the production. In large civil cases and class actions, thousands of boxes of documents are often offered in response to discovery requests. It does not benefit the respondent to scale back production because the more documents produced, the more difficult it is to find usable evidence.
Consultants provide litigation support to attorneys and law firms so they don’t have to ramp up the infrastructure to handle any particular case. These consultants offer support for one aspect of production or for the entire production process. The most common distinction between consulting firms is between those that provide traditional paper document production support and those that handle e-discovery.
Discovery litigation support for traditional document production includes document collection, scanning, encoding, conversion, and optical character recognition. The result of working on paper documents is to create an electronic database that has an exact image of the document and a version of the document converted into searchable text. The consulting firm could then provide manpower to help review and organize the documents into evidence appropriate for trial.
Consulting firms that specialize in electronically archived information (ESI) have become an official part of the discovery litigation support landscape since courts changed the rules of evidence to recognize the importance of email communications and through social networks and micro-blogging. These companies tend to focus on ESI processing. Many have designed proprietary software systems that claim to collect, organize and review ESI, obviating the need for lawyers to understand all the details behind authenticating an electronic mail chain.
Both traditional discovery and ESI litigation support specialists perform important functions in the conduct of civil cases. By having the initial set-up and document review done by people at lower hourly rates than the attorneys assigned to the case, overall costs are low. Special processing of documents into an accessible electronic format also allows attorneys to find supporting information on an as-needed basis and trace back documents easily, even if the initial reviewer was unaware of the importance of a document when it was created. initially processed.
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