 |
|
Litigation Support Legal technologies is a range of services provided to clients that are party to a legal dispute, and concern the access to data or documents that may be used as evidence to support one case or the other. The huge variety of electronic storage systems now involved in matters of litigation means that legal practitioners will invariably require specialist and timely support in undertaking their duties. Electronic Discovery (e-discovery) Information in electronic format required in civil proceedings is of an intangible form, volume, transience and persistence and will generally have associated “metadata” not present in paper documents. Paper documents can be scanned into electronic format and then manually coded with metadata. Computer Science labs assist in the collection, sorting, search and management of such documents within the legal framework. Computer Science Labs make available their dedicated D-Tech networking facilities and services to efficiently deal with the collection, preservation, storage and sharing of documents and matters of evidence. Preservation Preservation of documents and metadata creates special challenges. Meta data is a feature of evidence in litigation and must be preserved such that the provenance of documents can be adequately established and acted upon. Investigation and Analysis Examples of the types of data included in e-discovery are; e-mail messaging, accounting records, CAD files, Web sites, etc. This information may be stored on many types of equipment running different operating systems and application software. Computer Science Labs use forensic methods, procedures and software to help determine the relevance of documents to the matters in hand. Presentation and Review A review of material may include a number of formats such as printed paper, “native file”, PDF or image files such as TIFF etc. Presenting such documents may also involve the conversion of native files into an image format and the redaction of privileged or sensitive information. |
