In this era of technology innovation, it is easy to forget that some things haven't changed very much. Take litigation for example. The process of preparing and trying a case was established hundreds of years ago. A client seeks help in resolving a dispute. Counsel meets, formulates initial theories and looks for evidence that can be introduced in trial. Witnesses are interviewed and deposed. Documents are reviewed, culled, organized and placed on a exhibit list. Ultimately, the important ones get introduced at trial. You can read about it in Bleak House, written a century and a half ago by Charles Dickens.
What has changed is the amount of data litigators have to deal with. In the early days, when I first started trying cases, litigation was about case files which may have included a few dozen discovery documents. Big cases meant a couple of expanding Redwells. Most cases could be prepared the night before trial. All you need do was brush up on a few key documents and prepare your direct and cross examinations.
Next came the rise of the photocopy machine. Paper began to proliferate. Suddenly, lawyers had to deal with boxes of documents rather than case files. Soon after came litigation work rooms and, ultimately, warehouses of document. The term "document repository" came in vogue at the height of this era.
Litigation support emerged and flourished because trial lawyers couldn't begin to review and make sense of all this paper on their own. Instead, we created teams of associates, paralegals and document clerks to stamp, copy, review and cull through the boxes of paper. Later came database software, designed to aid the process of searching, sorting and filtering all the paper. When the paper itself became unwieldy, we moved to imaging so that we could transport the paper without bankrupting out clients.
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