Digital White Papers

74 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER LITIGATION AND PRACTICE SUPPORT Managing Incoming Document Productions Strategically vendors convert produced images to PDF and re-OCR them. If you have native file or OCR processing capacity it can be tempting to redo another party's production entirely. We have seen cases where one party produced natives to another party who imaged them, assigned new numbers and sent them back. Plan for how you are going to remove any documents the producing party claws back for privilege, and how you are going to delete documents and delete productions if required at the end of the maer. Disputing a deficient production If there are errors or omissions in the production, document what you received for your aorney and provide a recommendation on whether she should ask the producing party to replace it. Dra a clear communication she can send to the producing party listing the following: Including the suggested fix should help get you data you can use. If opposing mistakenly did not include any email aachments, asking them to rerun the production entirely as a new Bates range may be preferable to working with thousands of suffixed Bates numbers. Offer to speak directly with opposing counsel's tech folks or vendor - some problems are solved more quickly without lawyers involved! It is also helpful to have an agreed-upon procedure for re-producing documents; it can be confusing if one party produces replacement images and another uses suffixes or produced documents with new numbers. Prepare to be discouraged. No maer how badly the other side erred and how clearly you detailed the problems, your aorneys may decide for strategic or resource reasons to accept a bad production as is, or the other side may simply be unwilling or incapable of fixing their problems. It may be worthwhile periodically to remind your lawyers of the limitations caused by faulty productions, such as "reminder that plaintiffs did not provide custodian information so we cannot tell you the provenance of this document." If your production came from a third party or a small entity, you may not have any leverage to ask them to fix the production. Non- parties seldom care about your production specification, and even Fortune 500 companies with large in-house ediscovery capabilities have been known to turn over non-party productions inexpensively and unhelpfully. The Fun Stuff Once the production is loaded you can demonstrate your value to the maer by running analyses and providing information unobtainable INFORMATION REQUESTED EXAMPLE What you agreed to produce Parties agreed to produce Excel files as natives with extracted text What the production contained/what is wrong We did not receive extracted text for any file with an .xlsx extension What problems the errors cause We will not be able to search Excel files without incurring extra cost to extract text Suggested remedy Provide us with text files named by the starting Bates number for each xlsx If you have native file or OCR processing capacity it can be tempting to redo another party's production entirely.

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