All litigation, both civil and criminal, hinges on disputes about law and facts. We’ve seen massive interest in technology designed to facilitate legal research, but technology for dealing with facts (investigating them, proving them) doesn’t get as much attention.

Why is this so?

Part of the reason is the amount of time we spend talking about e-discovery, myself included.  E-discovery takes up a lot of space in our discussions of legal technology because there’s so much money in it and because lawyers are constantly admonished to learn more about it.  What we’ve forgotten is that e-discovery is a subordinate, secondary part of a much more important activity: finding facts and proving them.

Many e-discovery companies seem to have forgotten the purpose of document review, which is not to label documents as “relevant,” but to win cases by developing and proving facts!

We need to get back to the facts.

Sadly, and despite the development of some promising solutions, most of us do not use any technology at all to facilitate developing and proving facts. Instead, we write notes in legal pads and Word documents, or we re-learn the facts of our cases each time we need to use them at mediation, motion practice, hearings, or trial.  By using manual techniques such as these, we inhibit our ability to scale our case loads. Our capacity to handle cases is limited, and our existing cases put a strain on our systems and our memories.

We’ve optimized our processes for researching the law, and we all budget for legal research tools. We need to do the same with our processes for handling facts.

Fact management software, which is part of the broader category of case management software, fulfills this need.  Fact management platforms, from the old (CaseMap) to the new (CaseFleet, FactBox, Allegory) enable litigators to handle facts in a collaborative, reusable, and scalable way.  Each platform’s primary unit of data is a fact, which can be linked to other kinds of data, such a legal issues, evidence, and witnesses. The more modern fact management platforms have intuitive and fluid interfaces, which make entering data in them as fast or faster than hammering out a chronology in Word that’s far less useful.

For example, every attorney must review documents received in litigation: pleadings, responses to interrogatories, deposition transcripts, and document productions. But, we usually skim the documents on first receipt and then read them more carefully at a later date, when they need to be used in some way.

Even so, fact management remains a field that’s ripe for innovation. Clearly, fact management and e-discovery are related activities, and we can expect great benefits from harmonizing workflows from these related categories. There is even some indication that fact management capabilities will be added to e-discovery platforms, and vice versa.

Data visualization and machine learning have roles to play in helping attorneys manage their facts, and these avenues of innovation are just beginning to be explored. With regard to data visualization, consider tools that enable attorneys to see visually which parts of their case need strengthening, or to view a graph of trends over the lifecycle of a factual narrative.

As in e-discovery software, machine learning offers the ability to tame large data sets by promoting documents predicted to be relevant and demoting those that are likely less relevant. When integrated with fact management software, machine learning could help find support for particular claims.

The possibilities for innovation seem endless, and we can expect fact management software to get even better over the next few years.

A Texas native and alumnus of Rice University, Jeff Kerr graduated from Emory Law before co-founding the firm Mays & Kerr. After 5 years of litigating employment cases and consulting with other attorneys on e-discovery issues, Jeff founded CaseFleet to develop tools to help lawyers construct and manage their cases more efficiently. When not busy building CaseFleet, Jeff can be found playing with his two miniature schnauzers and new baby boy, relaxing with his wife Lindy, and playing the guitar and piano.