Production Pain Points

A lot of e-discovery writing (including mine) is on the changes taking place in the court system. But the fundamental purpose of this blog is to concentrate on the technology solutions that help accomplish cost-effective e-discovery. I will write about the themes and pressures because good software and services answers those challenges. But I will always attempt to bring it home to the technology that I believe can help to solve these very real challenges.

One such area is Production/Presentation. Production can be the poor stepchild in the e-discovery process, at least as far as the better advertised review and analysis cycles. But Production can be a potent weapon in the hands of attorneys and can be a real pain in terms of costs and time on the part of the receiving party. You don't hear much about it in terms of e-discovery technology though. The vaunted "end to end" claim of many an e-discovery vendor doesn't really exist, in large part because these platforms pass on their findings and data at some point to a production platform. There is nothing wrong with this, but it's possible to lose Production/Presentation in the shuffle in terms of the technology available to ease the pain. Let's take a quick look at a court case that demonstrates the worst possible Production decisions: Legaretta v. AstraZeneca.

1 -- Defendant did not include searchable metadata on a production that numbered 10 million documents.

2 -- They output discovery in TIFF files, some of which ran upwards of 10,000 imaged pages each. Only high-end workstations could even open them to view or print. (A nightmare in and of itself.)

3 -- 4 million pages out of the 10 million lacked page breaks.

Was this a ploy to get the plaintiff to waste time, money and resources? Quite possibly. Was it ignorance on their part as to what constituted acceptable Production? Very likely. Were they not about to give the plaintiff any kind of break? Absolutely.

Their terrible choice was all of the above but it was a dangerous game. The judge was furious although he stopped short of issuing sanctions. However, ticking off your judge is not an effective way to win the trial. Meet-and-confer is the time to hash out Production/Presentation questions, and companies should adopt software that enables them to painlessly output in a variety of formats. Think about it this way -- you don't have to use Production software to please opposing counsels. Use it to make your life easier. (And the judge happier.)

E-discovery Production Tools

eDiscovery technology won't help when a party is using poor Production as a weapon with which to wallop their opponent. But when poor Production comes out of ignorance or the lack of Production tools, then technology can indeed help. The features to look for in Production/Presentation technology include:

-- Security functions that grant and deny viewing access and actions based on user rights. Actions include screen-capture, copying or printing documents.

-- Digital redaction is a very useful item, delivering only relevant sections of sensitive documents for viewing while maintaining accurate records of redacted sections.

-- Supports a variety of output formats including native file viewing as well as graphical output like the ubiquitous TIFF format.

-- You would think that providing searchable metadata is a given, but you would be mistaken. Your technology tools should grant you this option.

Not every e-discovery Production technology will necessarily include all of these functions, but they should at least integrate with each other to provide this full raft of features.