Litigation Document Management

Use of document management enters a niche domain with it helping lawyers with their litigation cases. In earlier days, document relevant to litigation were all coded on paper forms which would further be uploaded on to a computer for attorneys and their staff to access them remotely. With the introduction of Personal Computers and the succeeding revolution of document management software, litigation document management answered the needs of the legal community in more than one way.

The story of revolution of document management system for litigation purposes

In earlier days, documents were converted to their electronic forms by hardcopy reproduction or a microfilm. All of this got a sea-change with the verdict on the CDC versus IBM case. The verdict on this case legitimized the use of a litigation management software in complex cases.

The old technique of collecting and organizing documents has now been substituted by the document imaging technology which allows the user to collect and organize the documents. The benefits of imaging in litigation document management is that the documents can be viewed off one's computer screen. The fact that attorneys and their staff could view these documents without moving a bit and pick the relevant documents necessary for the litigation case, alleviated a big headache for them in terms of managing the documents. More importantly, the imaging technique is more cost effective than the hardcopy reproduction example. Generally, images of the documents can be processed by means of an OCR ( Optical Character Recognition).

What is the relation between Litigation Document Management and Off-shoring?

Should the user wish to increase his profit margins, he could even ship the documents and get them converted to images off-shore. As is, one of the primary cost factors for implementation of a document management database is cost. Users are increasingly under pressure to reduce the setup costs of creating a database. Further analysis indicated that personnel costs were the highest amongst others in contributing to the high setup costs. Off-shore document management service providers have not only slashed the costs to a great extent, but also ensured that their imaging techniques evolve over the years to provide the best possible service to the customers.

Whether off-shoring or in-sourcing, litigation support document management is the optimum way of managing litigation related documents. Many companies have developed systems and software which take care of this function. In fact, a litigation document management software completes the end - end process of imaging to storage, indexing, retrieval, archival and destruction of the case documents. In all cases, litigation document management has proved to be a cost-effective option helping the attorneys to manage their case documents off their personal computer.

For users who plan to use the litigation document management systems, please note that this system is highly effective for complex cases.