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Litigation Support

Organizations use EDD services to restore and process their electronic data. Once the processing is complete. the team turns to a single, unified litigation support system that enables the entire legal team to work more effectively—electronically reviewing, annotating, redacting, integrating bates numbering and producing the data throughout the entire litigation process.

Organizations can realize the following benefits:

• Decreased risk—The electronic sorting and review of documents significantly decreases the risk that a human error will occur that would lead to the exclusion of a piece of responsive information during the discovery process. Such an error could result in significant penalties at trial—even lost cases—and is to be avoided in any way possible.
• Lower costs—Litigation Support systems include specially developed feature/functionality for the legal team which reduces the amount of time spent on reviewing each document and grouping documents with their similar counterparts in the system. These features allow for an overall reduction of time from capture to production, and therefore reduce labor costs during the overall review process. For example: using near the duplicate technology provided by a litigation support system allows for common documents with a similarity percentage of 85% or higher to be grouped together and tagged quickly in a similar fashion—automating an otherwise highly time-consuming and labor-intensive task.
• Effectively organized documents—Documents are automatically indexed within a litigation support system so that a user can more easily search for specific content or organize the potentially responsive content that they have identified. This enables more effective review practices such as grouping ‘like’ documents, as well as cross-referencing and comparing documents that are similar in content.
• Automatic bates numbering—Without a consistent method of tagging or numbering documents for identification purposes, parties run the risk of losing track of potential evidence. Therefore, both sides of the litigation need to apply bates numbering to responsive documents, which is a routine system that assigns case-specific chronological numbers to each piece of evidence in order to avoid miscommunication between opposing parties. Since large cases can involve tens of thousands of documents, the manual application of Bates numbers is nearly impossible, compelling organizations to use automated bates number system, as well as versioned productions to keep track of documents produced and delivered to certain parties.
• Electronic applications of redactions and annotations —Sometimes an entire document is considered to be privileged information and therefore inappropriate for use at trial. But oftentimes there will just be a small section or a line within the document that fits the criteria of privileged. Parties will not want to submit the document to opposing counsel as it is, but they cannot withhold the information either. In these instances, legal teams need to be able to apply redactions on the electronic data, which is to “black out” the text that is privileged so that the remainder of the information within the document can be submitted to opposing counsel. Most times a reason for the redaction is attached to the document in order to explain the “blackout” portion of the document to opposing party and/or court.

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