Most litigators don’t really enter the massive e-discovery world with millions of records but rather need to manage a 1000 files, get them reviewed, processed and ready for production. With huge sets, it is easy to find companies to help with the process since tens of thousands of dollars will be involved. Finding anyone experienced to help with a 1000 files for a couple hundred dollars can be hard. While many legal copy companies claim to offer these kinds of services, it is critical for you to be familiar with the issues related to converting PC Files into ready to produce PDFs so you know that your vendor is doing everything correctly.
This topic can’t be covered in a single blog but you have to start somewhere so we will start at the beginning: My client just dumped a copy of his server hard drive on me, what do I do now?
Our first step is to create an index of all the folders and the files for review. It is pretty common that clients create descriptive folder names so it is often possible that parts of the set can be quickly eliminated as not being relevant and certain other folders and files need immediate and close attention because they are key.
I discovered a trick for copying a list of all the files to a Word document so they can be reviewed- run the search, in the folder, hit Ctrl-A (select all), then shift – right click (the shift key is important to get the Copy As Path option – just selecting copy will actually copy the files), select Copy as Path, you can then paste the list into a Word file. A handy way of getting an attorney to actually look at the list is to print it. (if you highlight the folders, that will be what is pasted, if you select the files, that is what is “Copied as Path”).
Paste to Word:
Once you have the list and, hopefully, been able to eliminate some of the files, the next is to get a sense as to what types of files you are dealing with. A set of mostly PDFs, word docs and other Office files, typically is pretty easy to process. A set of email, zip files, media files, spreadsheets, and other files that are not convertible into images pose a variety of challenges that require special handling. Determining if these can be done in-house is possible would be a logical first step. Finding a competent vendor to help with processing if needed would be the second.
One of the challenges in dealing with files presented in native folders is keeping the files in order by source folder. You can do a * search and see all the files but if you copy them in that format then the entire set is alphabetical and the subfolder organization is lost. i-Legal approaches this problem by creating an index of the files in native order – by folder then file name. We then copy all the files to a temporary directory, with the new name being a sequential number. It is important that you maintain the index so you have the ability to tie metadata to the pages produced.
Once all the files are copied to a folder, you can sort them by file type which makes it much easier to process all the files of each type to PDF or to a marker file (more on that soon) so they can be numbered and labeled. While Acrobat and other utilities can create PDFs, Acrobat wants to confirm each filename which can be a headache if you have 1000s of files. There are utilities around that automate that process.
Once converted, you need to name and label but that is for the next post.
We are always happy to discuss the processing options so if you having a project, please give us a call.