OTLA Trial Lawyer Winter 2021

27 Trial Lawyer • Winter 2021 media accounts. What’s more, a follow- up interview with her clients revealed they indeed had potentially responsive information on multiple phones, mul- tiple email accounts for each person and across different devices, and for many of the social media accounts that were spe- cifically requested: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, SnapChat and more. This is the challenge of the moment for many small firms — the first time a practice is confronted with an unavoidable responsibility to produce evidence from all these different data types and digital source locations. She was mid-case, and prepared or not, she needed to respond. A series of questions arose: Where does one start to organize this effort? What does the entire process look like? How does one even collect all this data from all the different locations, defensi- bly and without spoliation? How much time will it take? What will it cost? These are the types of questions that large firms and corporate legal teams began addressing years ago and have built departments and repeatable programs around, supported by specialized e-dis- covery attorneys and staff. For any miss- ing or desired capability, from forensics and collection, to processing, review and production, they have established vendor relationships they can immediately lever- age. When a new case comes along, they have an organized response to collecting all data within the requested scope from the most challenging places and getting it processed and loaded to an e-discovery platform that offers a range of built-in tools for early analysis of the evidence. They can immediately strategize their review, estimate costs with hard numbers, and staff up internally or with contract reviewers as necessary. Additionally, with a fully loaded and indexed database, including essential metadata like dates, email senders, re- cipients and file names, they have im- mediate research capability. A single, well-crafted search could flag key com- munications within a narrow time frame across emails, multiple phones, Facebook accounts, Twitter posts and more. Most of these e-discovery platforms have ad- ditional tools that allow them to analyze communication patterns and timelines, browse conceptionally similar documents or swiftly organize prioritized sets of documents by relevance, issues, facts or potential privilege. With this wealth of tools, they can develop and hone work- flows that maximize efficiency and save their end clients’ money in measurable ways while gaining precious time for themselves to focus on more critical case work. E-growth There are many more tools available within these platforms, but the larger benefit is that with accessibility to these e-discovery tools, these firms build documented, repeatable programs. This See E-Discovery p 28