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My first day at my last job as an attorney, I was told to submit 3000 files to a team of paralegals to have them manually convert them to PDF and rename them us
by stult 7y ago
My first day at my last job as an attorney, I was told to submit 3000 files to a team of paralegals to have them manually convert them to PDF and rename them using a standard exhibit convention (eg EX-2019-001). This activity consumed three FTEs annually. I wrote a script to automate it in ten minutes.
If anyone there had even the slightest sense of how easy that would be to automate, they'd have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by paying some random kid $200 to write them a bash script.
That's just a simple example, but I ran into issues like that on a daily basis. Databases full of evidence that were discarded because no one knew how to access them or run queries on them. Whole inboxes of emails in ost files thrown away because no one knew how to open them. Hundreds of hours spent manually reviewing documents when OCR and a decent text search tool could have gotten the same result in minutes. It was just never ending.
- pnw_hazor 7y agoThere are cheap PDF tools that do all that -- many designed specifically for making and marking exhibits. Also, there are discovery production management tools that incorporate indexing, OCR, searches, and what not. For more complicated stuff you can use vendors. It sounds like your old firm liked to bill clients for all of that extra staff time -- keep the revenue up.
- stult 7y agoThis was years ago, and the commercial offerings weren't as well developed.