The first electronic database I supervised in litigation ended up costing a dollar a page. And that was before a single lawyer had looked at any of it.
Making TIFF images, using Optical Character Recognition software to create searchable text, entering basic descriptive coding for each document and exporting all this data into a usable format were handled by an outside vendor that charged separately for each step. This was actually cheap, because we started with paper documents, not dozens of hard drives and servers full of e-mail, Word files, PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets that first had to be forensically imaged and treated like evidence at a homicide scene on “CSI: Miami.”
