Litigation Support Group

Legal discovery is more complex, voluminous, and expensive than ever before and companies must take proper measures to ensure the most complete and comprehensive production of electronic evidence possible. Computers create and store massive amounts of information which take the form of strings of e-mails and electronic documents tied together by date, sender, addressee, or subject. Unraveling these strings of electronic data and tracking the connections to other computers is the essence of electronic discovery. Because electronic documents are created exponentially with each tap of the “SEND” key, the probability of perfectly recreating every document or string of documents years later is low. The consequences of not meeting this burden can be severe.

Wildman Harrold’s Litigation Support Group assists in determining the best strategy to extract and protect information for our clients and to extract complete information from opposing parties. If and when a case approaches trial, the group supports Wildman Harrold’s trial team in the courtroom. For very large cases, the group works with outside vendors to bring voluminous documents into a scalable, easily searchable database. In addition to e-discovery assistance, we offer a wide-range of technical services in support of our legal professionals and their clients. These services include document management and trial graphics for matters ranging from small cases to complex litigation, batch printing, software for special needs, electronic Bates stamping, and CD/DVD creation.

In recent months, representative e-discovery projects handled by the Litigation Support Group include filtering 40 hard drives—approximately 600 GB of raw data—for relevant file types, processing those files for metadata, translating the images into editable text, and converting them to TIFF for future redactions of privileged information. We have also worked with an e-discovery vendor to restore and de-duplicate e-mails from backup server tapes. The vendor imported the approximately two million e-mails into a web-based native document review tool. De-duplicating and filtering out spam e-mails resulted in approximately 800,000 e-mails, plus attachments. Attorneys and paraprofessionals could then focus their energies on reviewing and redacting privileged data. The entire multi-month project was completed at a reasonable cost given the volume, by the effective combination of outside vendors and our group.