E-Discovery Software Revolutionizes Legal Discovery

E-discovery software can speed up legal discovery in your legal practice. Suppose you have 20,000 documents which have to be reviewed for an importance case. Boxes of them are stacked in the corner as if a bunker is being built. Mere organization of the files will take a week, to say nothing of reading them all and organizing the findings in a meaningful way.

This is where e-discovery software comes in. Documents are converted to computer files by feeding them through extremely high speed scanners. These scanners can scan fronts and backs of pages, and also non-standard sized documents and carbon copies. The computerized documents become individual files which are stored in a computer. OCR or optical character recognition software is then applied, turning scanned document images into readable text.

Searching is a powerful, powerful benefit of electronic documents. Imagine that you are reviewing a document and find a bombshell revelation that could change the face of the trial. Without e-documents, you would have to manually re-review thousands of documents to check for further instances of this revelation or related comments. With computerized documents, you can rapidly search every single document for any specific phrase, in mere minutes.

Keyword searching is amazing, even though we often don't realize this because we are used to it. Documents can be searched by case number. By investigating officer. By counsel. Simple type in any keyword or group of keywords, and you can search every word in every document looking for what you need. This solution is completely thorough, and gives you the confidence that nothing has been overlooked.

Suppose you have a mountain of depositions on a class action lawsuit that has been dragging on for almost a decade. You remember a peculiar phrase spoken by someone, but don't know exactly who. You have deposed hundreds of people, and just can't pry the name from memory. You simply search for the phrase and are instantly looking at the deposition and the exact phrase in testimony.

You could never lug thousands of physical documents into a courtroom, but e-documents allow you to do so with your laptop. If you suspect a witness is lying, you can search previous depositions in your laptop while opposing counsel is questioning, identify the specific lie, and hammer them on cross examination.

E-discovery software also allows you to limit some access to documents without buying a safe, via encryption and passwords. It also allows you to easily assign workloads to research teams and easily organize the date they unearth.

Computers have revolutionized the way many jobs are performed, and the law is not immune to this trend.

E-discovery software can be the difference between winning and losing a case. Especially if your opponent doesn't have it!