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.