eDiscovery in litigation cases means data, data and more data. The end of days of delivering data on CDs and DVDs are fast approaching.  For the past 2 years, we have been using portable hard drives to transfer data from one entity to another.

• The clients provide their data to the law firm.
• The litigation support team sends data to the vendors for processing.
• The vendors deliver the processed data to the litigation support team.
• The law firm produces their data to the government agency or opposing counsel.

In late 2005, our Director of Litigation Support Services worked on a Second Request litigation case where she ended up with 70 portable hard drives in her office containing data received from the vendor on a rolling basis. The data on them was then copied onto the server and loaded into Concordance for attorney review in house, at the insistence of the attorneys.

Your litigation support team should have a stock of portable hard drives in their possession. There is nothing worse than having to run out to a store at the last minute to purchase a drive. Lost is the opportunity to get volume discounts or good Internet sales, and what if the store is sold out?

The smaller 3.5 inch portable hard drives are very functional and easy to transport. They are small, lightweight and range in size from 60 to 320 gigabytes.  They also have nifty carrying cases available in different colors.  At the very least, you should try to stick with the same brand and purchase a variety of disk sizes.  The well known brands like Western Digital, Seagate and Lacie are usually a safe bet, although we have all heard stories about “smoking hard drives” and “bad disk drives”.

If the hard drive is used for production, the client can be charged for the hard drive and a new replacement hard drive can be purchased for in-house stock.  The hard drives can be recycled over and over again for different sets of data in one case.  If the hard drives are used for different cases, a disk wiping software like BC Wipe should be used.

If you have any other tips on using portable hard drives in litigation support, please share with everyone in the comments.

A friend of ours working in the e-discovery processing business recently received an 18 gigabyte PST that had to be processed. In the e-discovery arena, a first step with electronic data we receive is to search for any PSTs and determine their size. The larger the file, the longer it will take to process for attorney review. In this instance, the immediate problem was that the file could not be copied to the network server. Every attempt failed as the copy process kept timing out.

Our friend went to “The Oracle”, as he likes to call Google, and searched for a software solution. He found a program called GatherBird Copy Large Files. After installing the shareware version, he copied the file without issue. Whew! Today’s technical glitch solved.

We all need to be prepared before we find ourselves in a similar situation. If you know of other products available to the litigation support and e-discovery community capable of copying very large files, please post a comment and share your experiences.

We are conducting a survey on IT and Litigation Support and would like your input!

In our experience, there are many ways that IT and Litigation Support can work together for the overall benefit of the firm. There are a variety of ways that they can learn from each other and share ideas that would benefit them both. This brief survey (10 questions) asks about IT and Litigation Support issues and a forum to discuss them.

We would value your input, whether you are IT, Litigation Support, or Administration.

Please follow this link to take the survey: Click Here to take survey

Thank you in advance for your feedback. We will post the results in about a week, so please check back soon.

While Litigation Support is a very technology intensive discipline, they don’t always see eye-to-eye with the IT department. The reasons are many: Litigation Support is often created and budgeted outside of IT and the practitioners largely come from the paralegal, attorney or administrative ranks. Although you would believe these two entities would find common ground, often their relationship is more noted for misunderstandings, misperceptions, and differing agendas.

IT and Litigation Support departments are tasked very differently. IT must provide quality, predictable service on a budget, whereas Litigation Support is tasked by the attorneys with getting the job done at all costs. For this and other reasons, Litigation Support and IT are separate entities in many firms, large and small. Litigation support is steeped in data. Their job is collecting, searching, and re-purposing data, that requires tremendous storage capacity, fast networking, and a wide variety of tools to search, extract, catalog, redact and “produce” that data. These demands sometimes run counter to IT’s mandate to provide stable, predictable, high-quality service for the entire firm. Large amounts of data on its servers or coursing through its wires can negatively affect performance. IT also has concerns about staffing a help desk that must know a couple dozen esoteric litigation support tools.

These are just some examples of the differences between IT and Litigation Support. Over the coming weeks, we will be exploring how to improve this relationship to realize the synergies and benefits of a close working relationship between the two.

We would like to welcome Amy Bowser, who comes to SAGE bringing her expertise and many, many years of experience in litigation support. With over 100 electronic discovery cases under her belt, Amy has worked in large national law firms and as a consultant serving corporations, and small and medium law firms as well. She has managed large, complex litigations, “Second Requests” and electronic discovery productions to the SEC, DOJ, FTC, and USITC.

Amy frequently speaks at law technology conferences throughout the US and is very active in the Washington, DC litigation support community. As the Director of the DC Chapter of Women in eDiscovery, Amy leads and supports the growing community of businesswomen in the legal technology arena.

Please join us in welcoming Amy to the SAGE team, where she brings her singular skills to an elite corps of IT engineers, consultants, and customer support specialists.