Much has changed since the time more than twenty years ago when the CDC v. IBM litigation more or less legitimized the use of computer-based document databases in complex litigation.
In those early days documents produced during discovery and determined to be relevant to the litigation were coded on paper forms, usually by an outside vendor, the coding forms were keyed, frequently by an off-shore keying service, and the product was loaded to a mainframe computer for remote access by attorneys and their support staffs.
About ten years ago this all began to change. The introduction of the Personal Computer, and the corresponding development of a wide variety of computer software specifically designed to address the document coding and retrieval application, did more than anything else to increase the use of the application known as litigation support throughout the legal community. No longer was the use of computer-based document databases limited to large litigation. Size of case, and size of firm, was no longer a limitation when it came to the creation of document databases to support the litigation research effort. Availability to the research and economic advantages of computer-based document databases became readily available to all who wished to employ them.
Today, again as the result of technology, another change is beginning to gain favor within the legal community. This is the use of imaging, instead of microfilm or hardcopy reproduction as a means of collecting and organizing documents.
The advantages of imaging are many. Images can be displayed on the computer screen, thus eliminating the need to get up from the workstation to retrieve a potentially relevant document. Images printed on a laser printer can be of a higher quality than microfilm or hardcopy reproduction. Images can be made available to multiple users at much less cost than hardcopy sets of the same documents. Images can be processed via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to product a computer readable full-text database of the imaged documents. And, images can be transported or shipped anywhere in the world at reasonable cost.
This latter advantage of imaging has led to another improvement in the way document databases are now being created - the use of off-shore coding facilities.
Although easily justified, cost has always been an obstacle when it came to the creation of document databases in litigation. Whereas most litigation related costs increase as the litigation intensifies, the cost of creating a document database is just the opposite. It represents a substantial up-front investment that only begins to pay dividends as the litigation progresses.
One way of minimizing this obstacle to the implementation of a document database is obviously to reduce the initial cost of creating the database, which is primarily personnel cost. Just as in the early days, when off-shore keyers provided the cost effective alternative to converting paper coding forms to a computer readable database, off-shore coding is now being offered by both many established vendors and new entries in the field as a means of reducing the cost of creating document databases.
Most off-shore coding is done in The Philippines where literacy rates are high and there exists an extremely dedicated English speaking work force. Images in the form of compact disks (CDs) are shipped to The Philippines and a coded document database is returned at an overall cost that is generally less than $0.50 per page.
The off-shore option is being used by both those who wish to create a coded document database and those who wish to implement the previously referenced OCR full-text option. Because the conversion of images to computer readable data is not yet sufficiently accurate to accommodate many of the documents employed in litigation, off-shore personnel can inexpensively validate the accuracy of the OCR conversion process, and at the same time "tag" for retrieval such important information categories as document date, author and recipient, which are only part of the text stream, and not separately identified, after OCR processing.
Even those law firms and corporations who a few years ago thought that in-house coding was the most cost effective option are beginning to see that except for certain special situations, the use of off-shore coding is both cost effective, and eliminates the potential hazards associated with administering a large temporary staff of coders.
Clearly, when a cost of less than $0.50 per page is compared to the equivalent cost of the few seconds at which an attorney or paralegal could spend looking at the same page, it is hard not to visualize an ever increasing use of document databases and the various options that continue to make them even more and more cost effective.