subject: E-discovery Software: The Leading Edge Of Litigation [print this page] The heightened role of the Internet in the legal environment has made e-discovery software an essential tool for law firms today. State and federal courts have converted to e-filing, and attorneys have learned to create and submit their briefs in digital form. As disputes fill civil and criminal courts, lawyers collect and analyze electronic evidence. E-mail itself increasingly becomes evidence in litigation.
These developments have led to e-discovery -- the process of locating, searching, and analyzing digital documents and other legal data by the parties to a legal dispute. When performing discovery, legal counsel for plaintiffs, defendants, and third-parties have to scan paperwork and collect electronic originals. Law firms must deliver electronic copies of evidence to the other parties and sift the data they receive. That is where e-discovery software comes in.
The best e-discovery software proves useful at every point of the litigation process. It can search electronic files for any information that might prove relevant to the matter at hand. Ideally, it should weed out duplicate information and documents as well as items of no relevance. Most digital evidence should be converted to PDF or TIFF format for analysis in the e-discovery process.
The Internet age has enabled law firms and their clients to cut the costs of discovery by significant amounts. A complex case that generated millions of documents would have cost millions of dollars for discovery alone in the 1970s, according to a March 2011 New York Times story. Much of that expense was attributable to staff time. Today, e-discovery software replaces most of that human labor and enables law firms to save their clients much of the money that would have gone into discovery in the past.
Any reputable e-discovery software should offer the capability of searching not only for date ranges and keywords, but metadata and tags. In addition, lawyers prefer software programs that incorporate the option of electronic annotation, so they can append electronic comments. They will also need to be able to redact (black out) certain data such as names and Social Security numbers to respect privacy laws.
One of the best uses of e-discovery software is for searching metadata. Information about the digital documents themselves may prove crucial to settling a legal dispute. When a program can identify the time an e-mail message was sent, the ISP involved, which individuals worked on a document and when it was finalized, and comments made and then removed, any of these points may support an argument in a controversy.
Creators of e-discovery software have also designed programs that will work for multi-national matters. Some programs are capable of recognizing foreign words and even characters, from French and German to Arabic and Korean, for the benefit of law firms that serve an international clientele.
It is not just content that e-discovery softwares can digest. Increasingly, these programs can perform a broad analysis of the evidence, and discern patterns that might have escaped a human attorney's eye. For instance, they can identify when a person chose to alter his medium of communication, from e-mail to instant messaging or telephone, or when the language turned more formal. Either can suggest the person had something to hide, or feared government surveillance.
