4 Best Practices for Software-Powered Litigation Productions

Thanks to the rising importance of eDiscovery and accurate document production, litigation support professionals are more valuable than ever. At the same time, the pressure is constant and the stakes are high for those productions to be on time, responsive and compliant with judicial instructions.

“Once a document collection review is completed, documents typically need to be produced to opposing parties,” said Terry Leang, senior sales solution architect at LexisNexis. “Litigation support professionals then need to prepare the electronic production using a software tool such as Concordance Desktop.”

During a recent LexisNexis webinar, Leang shared several best practices for running a production with the assistance of a discovery management product. Here are four key takeaways for litigation support professionals:

1. Organize your output
   Use the capabilities of your software tool to carefully tag or code documents for production during review. When you’re ready to organize the output, it’s a good idea to ask all users to exit the database, just to make sure that all records are included in the production. Also, Leang advises to “make a backup of your database so you can revert to a duplicate file in the event that something goes wrong during production.”

2. Export your load files
   Rely on the discovery management product to export database records to a delimited text file. The export should include every record in the current production query, in the order they are listed. “Be sure to query your production tag or run a search a relational search to locate all the documents that you’ve produced,” suggests Leang. “If you’ve just run a production, your current query should be active, containing the documents you’ve produced.

3. Creating your deliverable
   Leang advises that litigation support professionals should make sure to choose the production fields used to track your production and include only the required metadata fields per those production specifications. This will guarantee that the deliverable they are creating for the litigation team is accurate and responsive.

4. Quality control
   Leang suggests that litigation professionals do a three-stage check in order to perform QC on every production:
   • Perform properties checks in your export location reviewing each folder.
   • Do the number of images produced match your query?
   • Do the number of records exported in your delimited text file match the number of records you’ve produced?

“There are other QC options that may be useful as well, such as creating a production database by importing your production into a brand new database or rolling imports with rolling productions into the production database,” he said. “This enables the system administrator to ensure the production is flawless.”

The LexisNexis webinar hosted by Leang can be accessed for on-demand playback by clicking here.

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This post is by Daryn Teague, who provides support to the litigation software product line based in the LexisNexis Raleigh Technology Center.