OTLA Trial Lawyer Winter 2021

28 Trial Lawyer • Winter 2021 investment of time allows them to evaluate costs in a larger framework that measures the costs of the e-discovery tool kit against all the time saved with attorney review and traditional case management. This includes activities such as early discovery organization, document retrieval, deposition prep, timeline building, assembling of privilege logs and other indexes, and exhibit prep for briefs or trial. The more they measure, the better they can speak to the appropri- ate costs passed on to their clients, who increasingly require transparency and involvement in e-discovery cost manage- ment. Then, from a firm business per- spective, the efficiencies they gain in managing cases allows them to take on more cases and grow their business. This large firm approach may seem daunting to compete with at first. How- ever, as e-discovery pricing has dropped in recent years, platforms have also be- come increasingly user-friendly, intuitive and conducive to self-guided learning. With limited training, attorneys, parale- gals and legal assistants become comfort- able with a core set of tasks surprisingly quickly and begin to build programs of their own, or with initial guidance and support from outside experts. Indeed, the effort doesn’t have to be complex to begin to realize real and immediate benefits. The greatest challenge may in fact be the investment of time to embrace the new approach with a programmindset, if only slowly and incrementally. Another client whose practice deals with high-level employment and wrong- ful termination cases, like many plaintiff attorneys, was often frustrated by some of the high-pressure tactics from larger defense firms that assumed he had lim- ited, if any, e-discovery capability. Once e-discovery became an integral part of his practice, it was an immediate relief and check on those firms to leverage that capability during discovery negotiations. Utilizing an e-discovery platform that started small with his first case, the flexible search capability was a huge leap forward from his sometimes-paper- based, sometimes-PDF-based document review system. The ability to search across thousands of records at once gave him the ability to quickly land on key documents, and then pursue an orga- nized document review within the e- discovery platform itself, and soon after produce to opposition to meet his dead- line commitments. The platform also left him with a wealth of documents that he was able to flag by issue, capture notes on and easily ready for use in depositions. Of vital importance and consequence, e-discovery tools also allow an attorney to keep the database active throughout the length of the case, especially to con- sult documents as new issues arise (and even for related matters for the same client, further reducing time and cost). E-benefits Indeed, having immediate and verifi- able digital access to dates and other metadata would not have been available with the old approach. One of the biggest limitations of large, multi-document PDFs in e-discovery is the loss of the metadata from the native document. By way of example, these tools allow a prac- titioner to process 100 emails from a native format into an e-discovery plat- form, giving the ability to search dates, senders, recipients and subject lines. Combining them all, however, into a single, large PDF, none of those capa- bilities are available, and the only date related metadata a practitioner has the ability to search is that of the final com- bined PDF, which is typically useless in this context. Further, there is no true flexibility to sort and organize all those emails. E-discovery platforms allow a practitioner to process email from the native format and verify dates as research zeroes in on even a very brief time period. In the end, this may be critical to final settlement negotiations among other imperatives. E-discovery Continued from p 27