While Acrobat offers a variety of annotation tools, document coding with native annotation poses a variety of problems in the litigation environment that i-View seeks to address. The issues include:
- Multi User Limits
- Work Product Disclosure
- Annotation Management
Multi User Limits: If multiple people are working on a case using Acrobat to read and annotate the materials, there can be conflicts with accessing the files. Annotations also become impossible if you are trying to arrange for off-line access to files since it is exceptionally difficult to synchronize annotations among the many copies of a file (if annotations are made in separate copies of the same file, whoever recopies last has their annotations saved.
i-View addresses this problem by not saving annotations in the file itself but creating a “map” of the annotations in a database and drawing them when the file is accessed. i-View then synchronizes the database entries individually, allowing multiple annotations in the same document to happily coexist. This mapping process also facilitates multiple users working without conflict and ensuring that all of the work is stored without any loss.
Work Product Disclosure: PDFs are easy to store and share, providing experts, deponents and others with document sets for review and testimony preparation is simple. Of course, anything disclosed to an expert is no longer work product and is subject to disclosure. If you are annotating documents in Acrobat and then send them to an expert or others, all of the annotations and your mental impressions are discoverable.
The same process that allows multiple users to code simultaneously also makes it possible to maintain completely clean PDFs for distribution as needed. This way when you create a set for witness prep or expert review, the set is clean and eliminates the chance for inadvertent disclosure (while you certainly can make multiple copies and keep a clean one but trying to keep track of the clean copy or the working copy can be difficult). For purposes of your own prep or creating a witness notebook. In fact, i-View offers the options of stripping out native annotations (created by Acrobat or iAnnotate) so you can disclose only clean copies.
The system also allows the PDFs to be exported with the annotations so your final review set or printed copy has your annotations and notes.
Annotation Management: Marking up a document certainly makes it easier to understand what is important when you have the document open in front of you. However, if you have hundreds or thousands of documents and potentially tens of thousands of annotation, the lack of any organization tools for the annotations can seriously reduce the value of these notes. Further, having to open 1000s of files and then search around to find specific references can be tedious and, too often, cause certain items to be missed.
Annotation management also becomes an issue when dealing with a heavily commented document. Isolating the specific annotations related to the current topic can be a challenge. Having to flip through a hundred notes to find the ones you need is tedious.
i-View solves this problem by allowing each annotation to be fully coded including, date, summary, witness and subject. Witness and Subject Matter searches will not only lead to relevant documents but relevant annotations so all mental impression is fully captured.
A full description of how codeable annotations can supercharge your coding will be discussed in a future blog.