Litigation Edge was recently engaged by a plaintiff acting in person to assist with trial preparation.
This engagement turned out to be our most challenging to date. Our role included managing the process of digitization and document indexing, trial bundles preparation, preparing and filing court documents, providing paralegal and administrative support and a local office address for service of documents. We were also the “court operator” during the trial providing a service where we would draw up the relevant document referred to by counsel or litigant, and present it to the Judge and parties in the courtroom on a projector screen.
Our greatest challenge was an incredibly tight time frame – we had only one week to put a plaintiff’s bundle comprising 65,000 documents. Thankfully, most of the 65,000 documents had already been scanned and converted into searchable text using optical character recognition technologies (OCR). Deploying the E-Discovery Protocol (PD3 of 2009) was not an option in this case, as the case stretched over a 20 year period and most of the documents were available only in paper form.
In light of the large volume of documents (65,000 documents) to be produced at the trial, the exceedingly short time frame (1 week) for the preparation of trial bundles, and the fact that most of the documents had already been scanned into digital format, we recommended that the Plaintiff use electronic bundles (“E-Bundles”) in place of traditional paper court bundles.
Despite strenuous objections from Counsel acting for the two Defendants, the High Court Registrar allowed our client’s application for the Plaintiffs’ Bundle of Documents to be produced in searchable PDF format provided that we were also able to produce the relevant document to the parties in court efficiently.
By submitting E-Bundles instead of paper bundles, our client was able to save a whopping $50,000 in photocopying charges. We were also able to produce the trial bundles (we delivered two DVDs) in one-tenth the time it would have otherwise taken if the bundles were produced in paper form.
Aside from considerations of cost, the ease of portability and saving of physical space (480 volumes or 80 boxes v. two DVDs) of an electronic approach recommends itself. The evidence in this case stretched over 20 years, commencing in the very early days of personal computing. For the Plaintiff, the impact of technology on trial preparation stood out starkly as she remembers having 80 boxes of paper documents transported by lorry from Thailand to Singapore in the earlier trial eight years ago compared with all 65,000 documents contained in a single portable disk drive no bigger than the palm of her hand, and enjoying instant accessibility through the web, for the current proceedings.
Once the evidence was converted from paper to text-searchable pdfs, the ability to conduct key word searches produced significant advantages in the Plaintiff’s case. Deploying a search engine that we had installed in the Plaintiff’s laptop, she was able to retrieve, in less than two minutes, a key document that she had been searching for over the last 2 years.
As for “cost-savings” the equation is simple -
The more documents you have, the earlier you start to digitize them, the more copies you have to make, the more you save[i]. The task of copying 65,000 paper documents is a huge, even wasteful, expense when compared with making digital copies of 2 DVDs.
As for the pain of the initial digitization exercise, you do not need to undertake this yourself – we have been helping law firms of all sizes digitize their hard copy documents for trial or arbitration proceedings. We are usually engaged at the discovery stage or setting down stage to digitize and index documents.
You may not realize that you can enjoy costs savings even where your bundle of documents is not considered, by today’s standard “voluminous”. As shown in Appendix A – Costs Comparison between paper management and electronic management, the break-even point can be as low as 1000 pages.
For lawyers who resist going “electronic” and persist in treating paper as the gold standard, the argument “I like the feel of paper” is beginning to sound increasingly hollow, in the light of substantial cost savings, portability and ease of sharing, and the strategic advantages offered by electronic search and retrieval functions offered by digital documents over paper.
As legal costs continue to escalate with growing mountains of email and other electronic evidence , you can be sure that our Law Courts will continue to push the e-discovery and e-trial boundaries.
Originally posted on litigationedge.asia by Serena Lim
[i] Of course, if the case is one where you can get the client to provide you with native digital copies of the documents, that would be lead to even greater cost saving. However, that assumes a higher level of tech savviness by both the lawyer and the client.
