Depositions, Litigators, Technology

How To Put A Story Together From Big Data

Litigators: here are some tips for gathering your evidence into a story.

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For the last few weeks, I have been discussing e-discovery tips and different doc review platforms (part one and part two) that allow you to better find your needles in the haystack. For most of you, the e-discovery game ends when the doc review batches run out and you go on to look for another doc review assignment. However, if you are an administrator or a doc review manager, having a fully coded database is still the beginning phase of your job. So, here are some tips for gathering your evidence into a story.

Getting Ready to Use Your Documents

Let’s assume we have a fully coded database and we are getting ready for a deposition. We have reviewed all of the documents for that witness and have 300 hot documents that cover 30 different issues. The deposition is in a week and we need to prepare a deposition outline, narrow down the exhibits we want to use in deposition, copy the exhibits, and prepare some kind of exhibit index so we can find documents faster during the deposition. Once all of the hot documents are pulled, they will be used to shape the outline. Then, the new outline will determine which additional documents need to be pulled. It is a very tedious process.

If the witnesses’ schedules are such that you have multiple depos in a short period, you might be struggling to catch up. Instead of being fully prepared for all depos, you are just trying to get enough hot docs organized together to make it up as you go along.

Even if you have a saved search folder with all of the documents for the Chief Financial Officer, filtered to show only hot docs, filtered again to show only sales reports, if you have 50 documents, it’s still a big unorganized mess.

Everlaw’s StoryBuilder

The process of actually using your documents is much easier in Everlaw. You earmark certain documents to go to StoryBuilder. From there, you drag and drop them into an outline. You can share your outline with other members of the team and people can work on different portions of it simultaneously. You can visualize how the evidence fits together and move issues around in your outline. It also gives you a nice way to store all of the exhibits that are in your outline to produce deposition copies (click on the images in this post for demos of each feature):

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Analytics to help You Find the Exhibits Faster

We’ve previously looked at doc review platforms that allow you to sort e-mails and thread them back together the way they were stored in someone’s Outlook. That, however, usually only works if your have the native files with the metadata intact. With Everlaw, you can thread back together scanned images of e-mails.

It also comes with predictive coding to help you find potentially hot documents faster:

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In Doc Review, It’s the Little Things that Matter

In doc review projects, it’s usually the little things that bring joy. Things such as the ability to copy coded data from the previous document, bulk tagging, or not having to change your password to a new strong password every two weeks can help the sanity candle burn a little bit longer. So there are two things that I like about Everlaw that fit into this category. The first is the ability to use any browser you want. Most document review platforms make you dust off Internet Explorer.

More substantively, most document review platforms allow you to become certified administrators or trainers. Everlaw is governed by the principle that, if the interface is so difficult to use that you need to get certified to understand how to use all of the tools, something has gone wrong. Everlaw keeps it simple and intuitive. In fact, they just redesigned a bunch of features to make the interface cleaner.

Jeff Bennion is a solo practitioner from San Diego. When not handling his own cases, he’s consulting lawyers on how to use technology to not be boring in trial or managing e-discovery projects in mass torts/complex litigation cases. If you want to be disappointed in a lack of posts, you can follow him on Twitter or on Facebook. If you have any ideas of things you want him to cover, email Jeff at jeff@trial.technology.

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