A Rise in Electronic Discovery Project Management
In the legal world there has been a sharp increase in the way cases are prepared and how information is gathered. The digital world has opened up a new way that lawyers must adapt to and managing this task can be tough at times.
Electronic discovery has led to a change in the way information is gathered regarding litigation or criminal cases. In a lot of high-profile cases recently information that was gathered digitally has been used as evidence to either prove a party was innocent or guilty. It also caught the eye of the media and the legal world and everyone has realised the importance of eDiscovery and that it must be managed well for the data to be collated and presented in the right way.
Legal discovery is part of what a law firm should be doing but it is not directly the role of a highly skilled lawyer, it is not that they are incapable of searching for this information more it is to do with dealing with the technology. For example there may be a need to access the memory of a mobile phone to extract text messages or e-mails and present them in a PDF format. Doing this can take many man hours and it would be more cost effective and less time consuming to outsource this or manage a division in an organisation to deal with this area of data collection.
Why do you need an eDiscovery team?
In the future it will become more important for full electronic discovery in law due to the fact that paper documents the a thing of the past. More and more companies are shredding all of their paper documents and going online this will mean getting into offsite databases and hard drives of personal computers and laptops. Documents can also be made into PDF format on a mobile phone and then sent around the world to another smart phone, this will mean tracking down various devices and extracting information from them.
Legal discovery is going to be here to stay so it is important that this is managed correctly from start. It is a subject that is not taught in depth and many lawyers can only start begin to scratch the surface of the possibilities with electronic discovery.
You may also be representing a business legally so it would be your duty to inform them of electronic data legislation and how it must be kept. There have been cases when data has been destroyed and this has worked against the organisation as they did not keep proper backups of their data.
Having the right electronic document review team is just as important as having the best lawyers in today’s world. It is important that you hire the right management team to deal with research in this area, they will have all the rights IT professionals on and to ensure that your data is represented in the correct format when needed.