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Production Pain Points

A lot of e-discovery writing (including mine) is on the changes taking place in the court system. But the fundamental purpose of this blog is to concentrate on the technology solutions that help accomplish cost-effective e-discovery. I will write about the themes and pressures because good software and services answers those challenges. But I will always attempt to bring it home to the technology that I believe can help to solve these very real challenges.

One such area is Production/Presentation. Production can be the poor stepchild in the e-discovery process, at least as far as the better advertised review and analysis cycles. But Production can be a potent weapon in the hands of attorneys and can be a real pain in terms of costs and time on the part of the receiving party. You don't hear much about it in terms of e-discovery technology though. The vaunted "end to end" claim of many an e-discovery vendor doesn't really exist, in large part because these platforms pass on their findings and data at some point to a production platform. There is nothing wrong with this, but it's possible to lose Production/Presentation in the shuffle in terms of the technology available to ease the pain. Let's take a quick look at a court case that demonstrates the worst possible Production decisions: Legaretta v. AstraZeneca.

1 -- Defendant did not include searchable metadata on a production that numbered 10 million documents.

2 -- They output discovery in TIFF files, some of which ran upwards of 10,000 imaged pages each. Only high-end workstations could even open them to view or print. (A nightmare in and of itself.)

3 -- 4 million pages out of the 10 million lacked page breaks.

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