How does Litigation Support Services help the Law Firms?

1. How does litigation support services help the law firms? Litigation support service providers offer a variety of services to law firms and in-house corporate legal departments. Broadly, these services include digital forensics, electronic discovery, paper discovery, and trial support. Digital forensics (also known as computer forensics) includes the collection and investigation of electronically stored information in a verifiable manner, and law firms often use these services even before complaints are filed, to help preserve and discover key evidence. Digital forensic collections can be undertaken from a variety of sources, including personal computers, tablets, mobile phones, servers, external storage media, email accounts, social media, file sharing services, and many other sources. Electronic discovery (also known as eDiscovery or e-discovery) includes the processing, hosting, and production of data for review by law firms and corporate legal departments. Due to exponentially increasing data volumes, electronic discovery often incorporates analytic tools that can enable law firms to identify relevant data more efficiently than traditional linear review, so that higher billing attorneys are focused on the most important documents. Also due to the volume of electronic documents and security concerns, law firms frequently use electronic discovery hosting providers to facilitate online storage of data in specialized review platforms such as Relativity, so that they easily and securely access litigation data. Electronic discovery also can involve retrieval of data from archival media, such as backup tape restoration. Paper discovery can include scanning, reprographics, and blowbacks (printing electronic files to paper). Many companies still maintain paper documents that need to be converted into a searchable format through scanning and OCR (optical character recognition), so that the files can be hosted and searched in the same platforms as native electronically stored information. Trial support is a specialized area related to the presentation of the much smaller universe of documents likely to be introduced at a hearing or trial. This can include creating electronic trial binders and the use of trial presentation software to organize and display exhibits while in a court setting. Many companies engaged in digital forensics, electronic discovery, and paper discovery

2. refer trial support work to vendors focused on trial support, rather than offering such services in house, due to the episodic nature of such work.