Today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire covers a new eDiscovery program for litigation matters with a relatively small number of electronic documents (see article below), a Google Calendar enhancement for meetings, a Microsoft Office-compatible productivity suite for Android smartphones, and an email signature design service for law firms. Don't miss the next issue.
Affordable Electronic Discovery on the Desktop
While both large and small firms differ in some respects and certainly differ from corporate legal departments to an even greater degree, litigators in all three environments routinely handle relatively small matters. But you wouldn't know it given all the big iron products in the electronic discovery market. Even if a law firm has one of these expensive products, it might be overkill to use it for a lawsuit involving a handful of witnesses and a few thousand email messages and other documents. We recently learned about an eDiscovery program designed specifically for this common scenario.
Digital WarRoom Pro … in One Sentence
Gallivan, Gallivan & O'Melia's Digital WarRoom Pro (DWR Pro) is an
all-in-one desktop eDiscovery program designed for litigation matters
involving up to a million documents.
The Killer Feature
General counsel often complain about the spiraling costs of electronic discovery. These costs start from the very beginning because litigation service providers typically charge per gigabyte for the the initial processing of documents from key custodians. Even a small case can become costly with such processing — plus you're paying to process a lot of documents that will eventually prove irrelevant.
DWR Pro eliminates this cost. You literally drag and drop the custodian's documents into the program, which automatically handles the processing. For example, DWR Pro will preserve all the metadata, threading, and attachments in email files, unzip a collection of documents from .ZIP or other container files, and then index and create a searchable review database.
I met GGO's CEO Bill Gallivan at LegalTech New York earlier this year. "An estimated 70-85% of all matters involve smaller volumes of data," he told me. "The industry focus on high-end tools and custom processes has tended to disregard the cost and technical challenges faced by corporations, sole practitioners, and larger law firms alike when handling small and medium eDiscovery matters. DWR Pro levels the playing field. An individual litigator or litigation support professional can install DWR Pro, create a matter database, and conduct eDiscovery review on several gigabytes of documents within a few hours."
Other Notable Features
As Bill noted, DWR Pro doesn't just process email and other electronic documents, it also enables you to review this information. The "Robust Search" feature supports Boolean queries. Its "stemming" technology returns all words that use the same root (e.g., searching for "view" will also return documents with words like "viewing").
The "Find Similar" feature offers concept searching. Sort of like a thesaurus on steroids, it uses cognitive synonyms (synsets) to help you find documents with related key words that you may not think to enter in your search. For example, searching for "content" will also pull up documents containing words such as "photograph." You can toggle this feature off when you know exactly what you want.
When you start reviewing documents, you may not yet know the key witnesses. DWR Pro's "Who to Whom" technology graphically displays patterns of communications involving key words, enabling you to quickly identify the key custodians as well as other people of interest whose email and documents you may not yet possess.
Other features include de-duplication, issue code tagging, "Electronic Binders" for organizing key documents for depositions and productions, an activity and decision log to help demonstrate that you conducted your review in a defensible manner, unicode and multilingual support, and 30 reports to help you stay within your budget and on deadline.
What Else Should You Know?
DWR Pro runs on Windows and costs $895 for a single desktop license. You can use it for an unlimited number of matters, each of which can contain up to one million documents. There's no annual maintenance fee. If a case grows in complexity, you can move it from DWR Pro to one of GGO's products for larger cases — DWR Server (onsite) or DWR Remote (SaaS). Learn more about Digital WarRoom Pro.
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