You might think that a request to put together a multi-lingual, legal-specialist document scanning team at three days’ notice and to send them to a far-off corner of Eastern Europe was not an everyday occurrence but this is precisely what we have been asked to do twice in as many days.
This set me thinking. It is a common if understandable misconception that the process of digitising paper files (i.e. scanning) for review in connection with a litigation matter is a straightforward or even ‘commodity’ service; even without the complicating factor of the paper in question being many thousands of miles away in a foreign land. After all, the argument might go, why not pack everything off to a bulk scanning bureau, scan the whole lot at high speed and then see what we’ve got?
The reality, for large paper collections, is that the approach adopted at the initial capture phase will have a significant bearing on the efficiency of the subsequent review process. Poor decision making at this crucial stage can have an enormous consequential impact upon the effectiveness of the document review process (and a frightening impact on costs).
Such decisions include how to identify, select and prioritise the most significant documents for scanning; how to deal with live documents, i.e. those that are in everyday use without disruption; how to eliminate duplicates and near duplicates to reduce the size and cost of the review; how to structure and organise the digitised documents for optimal (and possibly unexpected) search criteria and then how to deliver the result in the most fitting way for the client’s chosen review platform.
The simple answer is that it requires years of experience, sound planning and logistics, expert project management and proper consideration of the needs of the document reviewer further down the line. If you are planning to do this yourself or to engage the services of a specialist to do it for you, we’ve produced a guide of ten things to consider entitled “Digitising paper: 10 things you should know”.
You can read it here