Alextronic Discovery
Alextronic Discovery
An Electronic Discovery Blog covering News, Articles
and Thoughts for the Legal and Corporate Community Author: Alexander H. Lubarsky, LL.M., Esq. - alubarsky@enterusa.com - Tel. (415) 533-4166 OR 800-375-4222 THIS BLAWG IS NOT AFFILIATED WITH THE WEB SITES WWW.DISCOVERYRESOURCES.ORG OR WWW.DISCOVERYRESOURCES.COM


Tuesday, October 26, 2004

The Paperless Litigation - Little Green Aliens?  

10.25.04

It finally happened, while meeting with a client involved in large litigation I asked the standard question : "So, how much of your discovery review will consist of paper as opposed to electronic documents?"

"None."

"K'suse me? I coulda sworn you just answered 'none'."

"I did, there is no paper here. All .pst's and their attachments and maybe some I.M. as well."

Still not believing my stunned ears, I gave my colleague a way out of their obvious faux pas.

"But, I guess I'm asking you for a total amount of documentation that may have aleady been scanned and OCR'ed or which will need to go throught that process."

"Alex, what part of 'none' don't you understand?"

Dazed and confused ..., I whimpered ... "none? Are you sure?"

"We will be harvesting about 150 gigs of .pst files and some MS office files that may or may not be attachments to the .pst".

I was finally living in the futue. In a world where paper is a bygone consideration not unlike that 8 track player or phonograph. I could almost see myself growing with age.

My colleague went right into some of his concerns about slack space, vectors, deduplication and delimited export files. The absence of the terms ."tiff," "OCR" and "banker's box" is nothing short of haunting. Metadata was finally a term that could apply to the entire body of evidence before the court. There was hope for the old growth forests and the Spotted Owl afterall!

Now that I take my hand written notes on my PC using my tablet pen and the new Mocrosoft One Note program ;when I think about it, it does not surprise me that I actually encountered a paperless beast face to face. I won't be surprised if another sighting is not far off. Should you claim to find yourself in such a strange encounter, make sure you can toggle on your digital audio recordrer and shoot it off to Alextronic for postin on this blawg 'cuz otherwise no one would believe you.

posted by Alexander | 1:24 AM

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