What kind of lawyer are you when it comes to repetitive tasks? Do you dive in and revel in the tedious work, or do you explore methods to accomplish the task with efficiency in mind?
The fact is that individuals and firms who will succeed in this new world are those who are quick to adapt and tech-savvy. Firm-wide data initiatives are extremely challenging, even in the best of times. Legal data is notoriously complex and unstandardized, yet firms need the capacity to be able to preserve, reorganize, enhance, query, and report on unstructured and structured materials in a wide range of formats to remain competitive.
This daunting task requires deep legal and financial domain expertise, coupled with advanced technology. Law firms may not have the in-house tech know-how that is needed to give them visibility into their financial and legal business data.
Take document redaction, for example, it is not only a legal ethics risk, but it can also be a technology challenge. Legal professionals must manually review hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of pages in production to find redacted content. This is a time-consuming, costly, and laborious process for which meaningful technology, that operates outside of traditional eDiscovery and BPO data vendors, would be the answer.
” To date, law firms have not had access to a tool which allows them to search for redactions in a production,” said Michael Will, Founder, and Co-CEO of ESILAB. “Now they do. This will change how big-ticket litigation is run.”
Michael is describing his automation tool called the Production Analyzer, which provides lawyers and litigation support professionals with the ability to identify each redaction in image-based eDiscovery productions in a matter of hours. Secure, user-friendly, highly automated, and scalable, the Analyzer can be run against both inbound and outbound productions and is able to identify a wide variety of redaction formats (including text and unlabeled black box redactions). Proof positive that advanced technology adds a new layer of speed and accuracy to the manual process.
ESILAB was recently commissioned by a Fortune 500 company to automatically parse, normalize, and extract data from semi-structured discovery-related materials. We successfully delivered more than 1.5 million data points for export into another vendor’s case management system said, Michael. Our client’s overall litigation strategy will be continually improved as we provided further insight into their data by performing complex calculations for inclusion into reports.
ESIL will undoubtedly be very busy supporting clients in 2020 with meaningful legal technology that permits more efficient data-driven legal and business workflow management. Although faced with a lot of uncertainty, law firms traditionally can change and adapt relatively quickly. If firms continue to integrate modern technologies to support their practices, they are sure to emerge from a post COVID economy unscathed and poised for growth.