Electronic Discovery—the Powerful New Weapon in Litigation

If you followed the Microsoft^® antitrust case, it’s hard to forget the ironic image of Bill Gates tripping over his own and his company’s extensive e-mail trail. Elliot Spitzer, the Attorney General of New York, has been particularly effective in using e-mail to successfully prosecute stock traders and business executives. Even the most sophisticated users of electronic communications, including e-mail and voice-mail, seem to forget that these systems leave a trail that allows messages to be retrieved as part of the discovery process.

What makes these documents so compelling is that they often contain informal, off-the-cuff remarks that would never have been made in “old-fashioned” written communications. E-mail seems to promote an intimacy that lulls people into saying things without regard to the consequences, often making them the smoking gun in major litigation. Electronic documents are also rich in descriptive data, called metadata, such as date written, author, matter number and more.

Finding the needle in the haystack

Okay, we know there may be valuable facts buried a in corporate e-mail system. The question is: How do we extract these nuggets from the millions of documents contained in many e-mail archives? For that matter, how does a defendant respond to a discovery request for electronic archives? How do they convert the documents to an easily read format, index them, label them, and so on? The answer lies with a rapidly growing area of legal support offering electronic discovery services.

LexisNexis^® Applied Discovery^®

Applied Discovery^® is a leading provider of electronic discovery services, working with many of the nation’s top law firms. Services range from data gathering and media restoration through data processing, review and production, enabling clients to search, organize, redact, Bates number, and produce electronic documents.

The Online Review application focuses on the elements of document review most important to our clients—speed and turnaround times, case and document context, and user control. We combine the industry’s leading turnaround times with comprehensive online document review functionality. Clients can follow the discovery process they already know, while benefiting from the advantages of superior technology along the way.

Data Gathering

Data gathering may range from offering guidance for internal IT resources to providing on-site professional assistance to collect data from clients’ computers, including network servers, desktop PCs, laptops, backup tapes, handheld devices, and any other storage medium. Our representatives help clients determine cost-effective strategies for identifying, gathering, and preparing only necessary information for review.

Media Restoration

Applied Discovery helps clients retrieve information from backup tapes or legacy systems—from standard e-mail and word-processing programs to arcane systems and uncommon file types. With proven, cost-effective strategies, clients can significantly narrow the set of potentially responsive documents.

Data Processing

We can process more than 200 electronic file types in industry-standard PDF format, with complete text and metadata preserved and indexed for search accuracy. The Applied Discovery industry-leading capacity of more than 5 million pages per day means documents will be available for review in days, not months.

Online Review

The Applied Discovery easy-to-use Online Review application is loaded with litigation-specific capabilities including: annotations, redaction, customizable document folders, automated Bates numbering and document branding. Display of disparate file types in a uniform Adobe^® PDF format means there is no need for multiple software packages to review different kinds of documents.

Sophisticated search functionality enables logical review of discovery documents within the context of an e-mail conversation, and with e-mail messages and attachments displayed in the “parent-child” context. In addition, documents can be sorted by metadata characteristics such as original author, address field (including to, from, cc and bcc), date created, or document custodian.

Document Production and Reporting

Applied Discovery enables clients to produce responsive documents according to specifications—in electronic or paper format, including:

• PDF files copied to disk
• PDF files transmitted via an FTP site
• PDF files or TIFF images exported for use with desktop litigation support systems
• Printed copies of electronic documents