Beware of Going Native No, going native doesn't mean stripping naked and running down the hall at your law office. ALM printed an article called Discovery Savings: Going Native. I honestly don't think Native will save you all that much time or money. In fact, reviewing in TIFF may be faster and is really the only choice if you're adding redactions and/or other endorsements (your vendor may need a couple of days lead time to start the TIFF conversion process before you start your review, however). How long do you have to wait for a 1,000 page Excel file to download using a native viewer compared to a TIFF rendition that loads quickly, one page at a time? What about corrupt files? Corrupt files can bring a native viewer crashing to its knees, whereas TIFF processing will often provide a placeholder for these types of files indicating that the original file was inaccessible by normal means. You will save significant time in troubleshooting hours alone if TIFF conversion can help separate the wheat from chaff when it comes to the quality of your documents. If you are reviewing in Native to cull your documents, that may be seem wise initially, but if your review tool can't convert that document on the fly to TIFF, that means a stoppage to your workflow so that you can export your work product to a system that does. You may ultimately need a tool that supports TIFF conversion for redactions, endorsements, and bate-stamping or you may want to produce relevant documents in TIFF, per agreements that you and opposing counsel made during pre-trial conference (Rule 34 to the Revised FRCP). Either way, merging your issue codes and document tags to a disparate system just because your original tool didn't support a specific piece of functionality is fraught with inconsistency and risk.

The real question is can you do both? Are you utilizing a tool that will offer the time benefits of reviewing in Native and switching over to TIFF-on-demand when needed? No reputable vendor in this day and age is charging you for non-responsive TIFFs. TIFF-on-demand is the norm, and its best to find a tool that has integrated native review (should you need it).

Labels: efficiency

  ¶ 11:08 PM 2 Comments