Storage of electronic files dramatically increases the volume of discoverable evidence on hard drives, servers, laptops, backup tapes, voicemail, cell phones, and databases. Digital Legal has the expertise to help your firm or corporation effectively manage each step of discovery – from locating the evidence through production and trial.

Our consultants determine a cost-effective strategy before any electronic evidence is collected. Digital Legal plans, controls, and delivers organized data to streamline your review for relevance and privilege. We load filtered data into dynamic online review applications or your own in-house application such as Summation or Concordance. You can review either native files or TIFF images with the associated metadata and text.

You can contact Digital Legal during an investigation or once a claim is filed. Partnering with us during the early phases of litigation prevents inconsistencies, case delays, and production problems which can create additional expenses.

DATA IDENTIFICATION
Electronically stored information (ESI) is anything created on a computer or digital device. Common types of ESI include emails, spreadsheets, word processing documents, presentations, databases, Internet histories, text messages, voicemail, and video. Digital Legal identifies the location of ESI and then targets the data of key players in your case.

DATA PRESERVATION & COLLECTION
Improper preservation and collection of ESI can lead to spoliation claims and sanctions. Digital Legal ensures that all file and system metadata is handled in a defensible manner. Our documentation also preserves a proper chain of custody and provides an audit trail for the court.

PROCESSING
Up to 80% of discovery costs are incurred during a law firm’s review of evidence. Digital Legal uses industry standard applications to create Hash values and to de-duplicate emails and other digital documents, thereby reducing the volume of data for your initial review. Our technology also de-NISTs the collected ESI to cull the remaining data by custodians, file types, keywords, and dates.

REVIEW & ANALYSIS
Some of our clients use Summation, Concordance, or Relativity; others outsource all data management to Digital Legal for review in a secure, online application. Digital Legal customizes your database for a relevance and privilege review using Boolean, proximity, or conceptual search methods. We help you select the appropriate method depending on the amount of data, number of parties involved, and length of review.

PRODUCTION
Rule 34 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure allows litigants to stipulate forms of production. We help determine the most cost-effective review and production strategy (i.e. native files of TIFF with text files) for your Rule 26 case management conferences. Digital Legal provides you and opposing counsel with a subset of data consisting of extracted text, metadata, native files, TIFF/PDF images or paper – whatever form you choose.