Back in the analog days, a parade of lawyers and paralegals would march into the courtroom right before a trial started, carrying dozens of bankers’ boxes filled with documents and other evidence. These days, attorneys in most medium-to-large cases digitize everything from contracts to deposition transcripts, photos and videos and organize them in databases from which they can search, annotate, and produce materials. Now, a trial presentation technician walks into the courtroom carrying just a laptop, but one loaded with a trial exhibit database that contains the equivalent of hundreds of bankers’ boxes of material.
How does this trial presentation database come to be? It starts well before trial, with the organization of what we call the "pretrial" database, the most popular brands of which are Summation, Concordance, and Relativity. Pretrial databases are repositories of virtually everything that you gather in discovery related to your case, including documents, photos, emails, deposition videos and transcripts, and expert reports. They allow you to store, organize, and retrieve your data as you prepare for trial. And though they are put together months and often years before trial, the way they are built and organized can have a big effect down the line at trial.
