Thinking Outside The Box To Expand Your E-Discovery Toolset

The best technology for your needs is often disguised as something else, as legal tech columnist Jeff Bennion explains.

If your office limits itself to just “legal technology,” MacGyver would be embarrassed to know you. Just as the best weapons can often be disguised as duct tape and Swiss army knife, the best technology for your needs is often disguised as something else. If you don’t believe me, go into any big electronics store that sells video games and computer stuff. Go to the PlayStation section and look for a charging cable for a DualShock controller (the standard wireless controller). It’s just a micro USB cable. Now, go over to the phone or tablet section and look for a charging/data transfer cable. It’s the exact same thing. It’s a micro USB cable, only the price is going to be totally different. Check my math if you want. Here’s a 10’ DualShock cable made by Insignia for sale at Best Buy for $12.99 and here’s the exact same cable made by the exact same manufacturer, only it’s six inches shorter and labeled as a tablet data transfer cable, and it’s $2 more. Sometimes you can get the exact same thing for cheaper by looking for it under a different use.

Using Non-Legal Software To Fix Legal Problems

Now, imagine you are working on a case with only about 5,000 documents and you do not want to pay to host it anywhere, but there’s no way you can organize and sort all of those records. You want to be able to add tags and sort and filter like you do in Big Data cases, but not so much that you want to pay $8,000 a month + license fees to someone to host it and provide a doc review platform. The answer is easy – go two aisles over to the photography section and check out one of the easiest doc review platforms that is so cheap it’s bundled for free with other programs.

For the 12 or so of you who have not had the honor of doing doc review and have never seen a doc review platform, let me describe it to you. Doc review software is all basically the same:

  • there’s a panel where you see your list of docs;
  • there’s a doc viewer panel where you can see the documents you are coding;
  • and there’s a metadata panel where you can add tags and metadata to each document.

You go through the documents in the list and review each document, adding the appropriate tags and data to each document to make it easier to search and filter documents later. The photographer lawyers out there reading this right now might be thinking, “A program that lets you review files and add data to them to sort and filter later? You mean like Adobe Bridge?” Precisely.

Here’s how you do it.

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Set Up Your Data – Keywords, Labels, and Ratings

Bridge lets you add keywords (can have more than one), labels (can have only one per document), and a 5-star rating system (obviously, a document can have only one rating). By default, there’s a bunch of photography stuff in there, so let’s get rid of that and make it more suitable for reviewing legal documents. Here, I’ve got as a sample document, over a thousand separate excerpts from the California Rules of Court and some pictures:


Manage your labels in the Preferences menu:

Add keywords in the panel on the right:

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You can create keywords and sub-keywords. Here, I have a zoomed view so you can see the keyword structure I created.

Clean up the panels on the left to show only keywords, labels, and ratings:

Click on documents to add data. Clicking on the circles under each document and right above the file name lets you quickly add a star rating for each document:

You can use this method to rate documents or use a label as I have here. Apply labels using the keyboard shortcuts or by selecting the label from the Label menu shown above. Clicking on the keywords on the right lets you tag a document with a certain issue or keyword.

Filter your documents by clicking on the filter on the left. If you want to show just 5-star documents, click on the 5-star icon on the left. If you want to show just the documents that pertain to future lost earnings, click on that filter on the left. The filter panel also shows you how many documents are in those categories. It’s important to note that the filter labels don’t show up until you have at least one document in that category. So, as soon as you tag a document with 2 stars, you will now be able to filter to show just the 2-star document(s).

Bridge also allows you to adjust the viewer window to show one document at a time to micro thumbnails to get an overview of your data:

This is helpful if you want to bulk tag documents. Zoom out to thumbnails using the slider at the bottom to quickly see which documents are pictures, select all pictures, and tag appropriately.

This is also helpful if you want to bulk tag e-mails. By zooming to thumbnails, you can quickly see which documents are e-mails by their headers.

Double clicking on a file here opens it for viewing the whole document. The data that is added to the files are embedded in the files, not with the program. So that means that I can install the documents on the cloud or on a network and when I access it from different computers, the tags are still there with each document. This makes it a great collaboration tool.

Conclusion

Bridge does not have all of the advanced features you get in a large doc review platform, but it’s perfect for small cases. It’s nice sometimes to organize documents locally because you can work with them so much faster without having to wait for each document to load. This is also a good way to organize the documents that you have pulled out of your doc review platform.


Jeff Bennion is Of Counsel at Estey & Bomberger LLP, a plaintiffs’ law firm specializing in mass torts and catastrophic injuries. Although he serves on the Executive Committee for the State Bar of California’s Law Practice Management and Technology section, the thoughts and opinions in this column are his own and are not made on behalf of the State Bar of California. Follow him on Twitter here or on Facebook here, or contact him by e-mail at jeff@trial.technology.

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