Canadian Lawyer

w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m J u l y 2 0 1 4 19 over it, to somewhere else — either their lawyers' systems, opposing coun- sel's, a third-party vendor, or the court/ regulatory agency. This raises questions around confidentiality, privilege, pri- vacy, and sometimes data export or security. Issue identification and resolu- tion benefits from legal analysis, as well as technical problem solving. In contrast, litigation support ser- vices happen against data that, gener- ally, has been removed from a company, usually part way through or towards the end of the e-discovery. Generally, litigation support involves all activities, usually within the law firm, designed to prepare a litigator to try a case. Litigation support activities include the organization of documents and evi- dence control, including paper-based document management. With the use of automated litigation support software, litigation support activities are increasingly occurring within technology systems, in which documents are organized into search- able databases. The organization of the documents as evidence or potential evi- dence is litigation support; the retrieval and treatment of those documents to prepare them for loading into that data- base is e-discovery. If e-discovery is about ESI integrity, litigation support is about evidence control through evi- dence management. Increasingly, aspects of litigation support and e-discovery merge as law firms (and some corporations) work extensively with ESI in a native or near- native format until production, and law firms acquire sophisticated technology to manage documents. Much of the lat- est e-discovery technology takes care of tasks that used to be handled (usually manually) by litigation support person- nel. Examples include the automated linking of parents and attachments, auto-assignment of control numbers (Bates numbers/ranges) within the evi- dence identification and control grid, and metadata auto-population within the grid, but increasingly also includes the auto-classification of documents (predictive coding). However, the tech- nology tools for e-discovery and litiga- tion support may not be equivalent in what they are intended to do and how they do their work, and care should be taken not to assume the use of any technology merges into expertise in any given discipline. Corporations or in-house legal depart- ments that want to bring e-discovery in-house will likely be best served by identifying or recruiting candidates with e-discovery backgrounds and skills; it is unlikely many corporations will require personnel with litigation support skills. In contrast, law firms will definitely require personnel with litigation supports skills to service their litigation departments, and may also require e-discovery personnel, depending on where they want to sit in the e-discovery value chain. Vendors of professional or technical services may also need a mix of both skillsets. Dera Nevin is an e-discovery lawyer and consultant, and is the managing director at re:Discovery Law PC. She can be contacted at dera.nevin@rediscoverylaw.com. TIME: EVENT: 12-month, part-time, executive LL.M. for lawyers and business professionals Advance your career to the next level! Learn important legal and business concepts that can be immediately applied to better serve your clients. Explore the implications of real-life cases in an increasingly complex global business environment. Acquire in-depth knowledge of how the law interacts with both the private and public sectors. For more information please contact Jane Kidner, Assistant Dean Professional Legal Education at j.kidner@utoronto.ca http://www.law.utoronto.ca/programs/GPLLM.html or visit our website: UofT-GPLLM-IH-June-14.indd 1 14-04-30 1:15 PM

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