LITIDOC®
Making Litigation Easy™
BACKGROUND
The world has arrived at an inflection point in the history of the printed word perhaps unlike
anything since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440.
But instead of mountains of paper documents cluttering the physical
landscape, the crisis today is about mountain ranges of digital documents
cluttering the electronic landscape. If it took paper documents five
hundred years to fill up the physical landscape, it has taken digital
documents just over thirty years to break all prior records in the electronic
landscape. Now, even the wildest predictions regarding the growth of
electronic information routinely become grossly inadequate
laughingstocks within a matter of years. The truth is that the
exponential growth of electronic information is accelerating, and that
trend is expected to continue unabated for the foreseeable future.
The problem with this largely invisible and deceptively innocuous development is that courts are now mandating that all potentially relevant electronic information be preserved from the moment there is a reasonable likelihood of litigation until the dispute in question is settled or the litigation is final. Getting
used to the idea that we are living in the midst of an unprecedented
"big bang" of electronic information is no easy task. Taking it a step
further and trying to imagine what it means to be under a legal duty to preserve such information indefinitely pending litigation is even more daunting. What effect this may have on individuals and entities impacted by and ensnared indefinitely in our judicial system with no hope of easy or inexpensive relief or escape is anybody's guess. It is really too
soon to predict the final results, but the early indications are disturbing. Based on the enormous costs and delays already being incurred by individuals, corporations, government agencies, financial institutions, and hospitals as
a result of the legal necessity to preserve, process, produce, and present enormous amounts of
electronically stored information (ESI), the current prospect is one of
accelerating costs and delays and increasingly limited visibility. Long delays and huge out-of-pocket costs are bad enough. But an
increasing inability to penetrate the electronic maze for purposes of
obtaining accurate and reliable information for effective strategic
planning and decision-making is potentially far worse. As a result, in today's
environment of exponentially exploding volumes of ESI, American business
and government decision-makers are increasingly flying blind in a growing tsunami of inpenetrable, unmanageable,
and indecipherable electronic data.
Defendants are now routinely
abandoning valid defenses and settling cases not because of the merits
of the claims, but because of the huge costs of discovering and managing
the necessary information to defend themselves. Plaintiffs, likewise,
are abandoning valid claims and dismissing valid claims not because of
the merits of the defenses but because they can't afford to find the
truth in the growing electronic haystack. As a direct and proximate result of the rapid and explosive growth of ESI,
decision-makers in business and government are now in many cases
grossly misinformed with respect to the operative facts of disputes of
all kinds, to the point that the idea of justice and strategic
decision-making based on truth and reality is now
at risk in America.
BREAKTHROUGH
Just as a tsunami obliterates all structures in its
path, the ongoing explosion of electronic information
threatens to wipe out the clarity and understanding of operative facts that business and government leaders
desperately need to effectively evaluate and respond to the challenges and disruptive potential of
major litigation. But the good news is this. A effective solution is on the
horizon. If the Model T Ford represented a unique and revolutionary way
to get cost-effective and reliable transportation to a majority of
Americans, and if the personal computer represented a unique and
revolutionary way to get the power of mainframe computing to a majority
of Americans, the LITIDOC® Litigation Management System™ is a unique and revolutionary way to ensure that leaders in
American business and government will have the essential tools they need
for arriving at timely and astute decisions in the context of
litigation.
In a nutshell, the LITIDOC® Litigation Management System™
is based upon rapid and ongoing developments in the security,
manageability and cost-effectiveness of online data storage
technologies. Instead of relying on questionable "litigation hold"
orders to custodians in many cases located in remote and inaccessible
regions around the world, business and government leaders are now able
to require custodians to certify that all potentially relevant
evidence in their possession, custody and control, whether on
company-controlled media such as mainframes and desktops or
custodian-controlled media such as laptops, flash drives, smart phones,
or social networking websites, has been copied and uploaded onto a website
utilizing the LITIDOC® Litigation Management System™. As a result, the risk of loss or destruction of key
evidence is substantially minimized, and the potential for criminal or civil liability
for failure to preserve evidence is focused upon
the responsible individual custodian, and further, top decision-makers in business and government
are given a unique and early opportunity to use state of the art automated search and review technologies
to conduct an "enterprise search" of all the potentially relevant
evidence in the case and thus make accurate early case assessments quickly, easily, and inexpensively.
Thus, as a result of the unique and proprietary LITIDOC® Litigation Management System™, the
potential now exists for a safe, secure, and easy-to-use "cradle to
grave" methodology for preserving, collecting, uploading, storing, and
presenting all potentially relevant evidence, as needed, throughout the
course of litigation or other dispute resolution procedures including
mediation and arbitration without risk of any interruption or break in
the
original chain of custody of the documents. This revolutionary
breakthrough is made possible through the use of a series of controlled online document silos,
with various levels of securely accessible content, which permit the
effective management and control of all potentially relevant ESI from
discovery, pre-trial, trial and appeal or other final disposition of the
litigation or other dispute resolution procedure. Therefore, as a direct
offset and counter to the huge costs and delays associated with the
explosive growth of ESI, the LITIDOC® Litigation Management System™
leverages highly favorable technological and economic trends in the
area of online storage to provide an unparalleled and fully scalable
solution for managing relevant evidence during the course of disputes. As
a result, strategic policy-makers and decision-makers in American
business and government will be able to arrive at accurate and amazingly
complete early case assessments in
volatile, complex, and fast-moving crises thereby formulate timely and
appropriate action plans to protect and preserve the best
interests of their particular organization. There is no other solution
on the market today that offers top management a similar level of
control, speed, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness in managing litigation
or other dispute resolution procedures.
BATTLE PLAN
The
time for paralysis, procrastination, and delay has passed. The tools
needed to give American leaders in business and government the tools
they need to manage the ongoing crisis in the quest for truth and justice in the American judicial system are now at
hand.
The time has come to snatch victory from the looming mountains of
undifferentiated electronic information now threatening to swamp and
engulf our personal, government, and corporate landscapes and thereby
ensure the supremacy of truth, freedom, and the American system of free
enterprise for the rest of the 21st Century and beyond.
|
|