Crane on Law by James Crane

Aristotle thought that earthquakes were caused by subterranean winds.  OK, so he was a little off, according the USGS - tectonic plate movement simply fell outside his realm of experience.  Like Aristotle, though, many attorneys think their methods are as good as it gets.  What we attorneys have to learn is that there is always room for improvement.  This is especially true with legal technology tools.  Advances in scanning and optical character recognition, and new efficiencies in capturing and organizing digital data allow the technologically astute practitioner to nimbly navigate through a tangled jungle of documents.  This saves the client money and ensures more accurate discovery. 

 Recently, one of our law firm partners had a case with 8 major defendants that produced more than 100,000 paper documents in their initial disclosures.  The issues in the case were very complex and would require extensive depositions of high-level executives.  The 7-member firm had to decide how they would thoroughly review and evaluate the documents in order to best prepare for the make-or-break depositions.  Enter Altep solutions.  After some careful analysis and discussion, the firm decided to utilize the Inspicio® review tool and a centralized litigation repository.  Once the paper documents were scanned in using our state-of-the-art OCR technology, we were able to accurately search and categorize all of the materials for priority and ease of review.  Ultimately, 2 attorneys were able to do the work of 10.  This approach allowed the firm to evaluate the key documents early in the process and reduced the overall "man-hour" review time by roughly 90%.  Not to mention the advantage of limiting the review to the responsible attorneys instead of assigning the first review to attorneys that were unfamiliar with the client and the case.  Moral of the story: the firm's client was very happy with the cost-savings and the advantage of exceptional work product enhanced by technology.