Remember when attorneys had to travel to offices to review paper documents as part of the discovery process? They still do. The holdover from our paper discovery days means that accessibility to legal expertise is limited to those qualified resources living near and willing to commute to a specific location. And while the right number of attorneys may be available in dense urban areas to handle the increasing volume of electronically stored information (ESI), they may not always be the most appropriately qualified for the matter.
For example, a recent life sciences IP patent litigation matter handled by our company included tens of thousands of complex documents requiring both JD and PhD-level subject matter expertise for accurate understanding and issue coding. Given the required combination of legal, academic and document review-specific expertise, finding the right reviewers within commuting distance to an existing—or even temporary—review center would have been an insurmountable hurdle, regardless of the client’s time and budget flexibility.
