Technology Roundtable
Technology Turns The Legal Industry On Its Ear

Editor: In your judgment, what are the most important differences between your services and those of your competitors?

Fehrman: At Electronic Evidence Labs, we specialize in the recovery of the digital "fingerprints" left by the routine use of computers and other electronic devices. Even erased files can be recovered and examined, ensuring that a company has all of the evidence available to it to support its investigation. We also provide expert tape restoration services and have the capability to work with hundreds of different tape formats. Only a handful of providers in the U.S. can handle a case that involves that many different backup tape formats. At any given time in our labs, we are working on 500 to 1,000 tapes involving terabytes of data.

Another factor that sets us apart is our use of emerging technologies to perform such functions as data collection and online review to reduce the total costs of the project. For instance, our proprietary duplicate management software, OnSite Uploaderª, enables us to reduce the volume of data by as much as 85 percent prior to processing the data.

Also, a forensics expert must be able to react immediately. We have built a mobile and incident response team, which can be at any location in the U.S. within 12 to 18 hours and outside of the U.S. within 24 to 36 hours in response to a customer's request. With teams presently in 23 countries, we are mobile and global with the expertise and flexibility to go to the data and correctly protect it.

We take a consultative approach to working with the litigation team to limit the scope of data on the front end of a project, which helps to reduce the total cost of the project. Also, in order to protect the data and integrity of our clients, we implement high levels of physical and electronic security measures in our data centers and labs.

Korb: The LawyerLinks Advantage (www.lawyerlinks.com) is a leading edge research tool designed specifically for corporate advisors that does not require the use of Boolean and other search structures. Search-based services often yield long lists of results with unpredictable levels of relevance and detail. LawyerLinks enables corporate counsel to find answers quickly, study unfamiliar topics and keep up-to-date on the newest developments. Digesting information by topic keyword, LawyerLinks results in no false positives.

In the past, legal research tools were designed to be used by specialists, who did vast amounts of research. Consequently, those tools have been very complicated to use. In sharp contrast, our product is designed to be used by lawyers who don't have the time or the patience to do extensive research themselves. LawyerLinks optimizes corporate law research by indexing information by topic. It is simple to use because it is organized in a way that lawyers, particularly in the corporate setting, do their work.

I compare what we're doing for corporate counsel with what Bloomberg has done for the stock floor traders. Before Bloomberg brought all the information together on one computer screen, traders had to piece together data from ticker tapes, faxes, telephones, terminals and a variety of other sources. The collation performed by Bloomberg for the financial community is what we are doing for the legal community.

Our team of research editors creates proprietary topic-index pages that contain one-click navigation to source materials. They then link together and organize topics into specific subject matter collections.

Editors also format and cross-reference content in the LawyerLinks library of statutes, rules and official interpretations.

Our topic-index page approach enables advisors to harness the "seamless web" of legal precedent and practice.

Strack: With over 12 locations nationwide, as well as a European location and extensive international capabilities, OnSite specializes in complex and fast moving cases involving multi-terabytes of electronic data. With global resources to handle any case accurately and efficiently, we're nimble enough to be activated anytime, anywhere.

In no matter what direction the discovery process takes our clients and their cases, we have the outstanding staff, proven methodologies and advanced technology ready to deliver cost effective management of the documents, data and e-discovery processing. We know that winning a case is not enough. Time, cost, security, accuracy, and quality are all part of the value proposition demanded by litigators.

When litigators partner with us, they join a winning family committed to excellence. We provide the complete solution to all of their discovery related needs - no excuses, just results!

Our e-discovery services include recovering email from backups, parsing tiff/pdf conversion, performing redactions, extracting meta and full text data, searching and reporting data output in any format and other tasks to collect, search, sort, review and store information so that it can be retrieved quickly and efficiently where and when it is needed.

While 90 percent of documents created today are created and stored electronically, the other 10 percent require processing along with documents historically maintained in paper form. Our paper discovery and litigation support services include document collection, unitization, scanning, indexing and coding, OCR/OWR/branding, blowback/ printing, production in image or paper and format assistance. We also provide black-and-white and color litigation copying, digital printing, oversized copying, and bindery and labeling services to round out the full suite of services litigators need in preparing their cases.

DEALVault, our deal room document review service offering, is available 24x7 with low cost, high speed access. DEALVault is secure and easy to use.

Our web repositories are Internet-based with capabilities for native document review, tiff image review and concept searching.

Our forensics, data collection and tape restoration services are also available 24x7 with the capacity to process over seven terabytes of data a day. We can handle 80 tape formats and more than 200 types of backups. Among other capabilities, our computer forensics services perform password and deleted file recoveries.

As well as extensive testifying experience, we offer pre-discovery project management, e-discovery best practices and other consulting services. Our legal staffing services include temporary attorneys, forensics engineers and litigation support staff.

Editor: How do you see your technology and services evolving?

Korb: Soon, we plan to cover several other areas of law that lend themselves well to topic-based research. For instance, we could add employment and labor law, or any area that is federally regulated, such as food and drug. Over time our list will grow, but for now banking, intellectual property and tax are on the top.

Also, we will continue to provide collaboration tools and personalization capabilities for customizing the environment. We are very pleased to be making client/matter ID tracking available in our upcoming release. Another significant feature will be the capability for the user to return to the last page he viewed when time has lapsed between research sessions.

Strack: Right now, clients are moving rapidly up the technology curve, building technology into their practices, and looking for smarter ways to handle the explosion in the amount of discoverable evidence. We also have been engaged in the last year on several global assignments.

All over the world, e-discovery has become a challenge and caused a paradigm shift in litigation as a whole. Multinational companies with subsidiaries in other countries that are involved in government-led investigations need to gather electronic data. OnSite is one of only two companies in the world capable of doing all of the necessary forensics and electronic discovery work on a global scale.

Coupled with our award winning technology and service oriented approach, our global capabilities make us the preferred vendor for many of the leading law firms and corporations in the U.S. and the world.