The differences between manual production, eProduction and eDiscovery
Choosing the right document production system can save you time, money and frustration.
Understanding the differences between the available electronic discovery solutions is the first step towards picking the right system for your firm.
Manual production
Manual production utilizes the tools that come preloaded on your computer to convert electronic documents to standardized document formats (e.g., PDF or TIFF) and/or apply Bates numbers.
This method only meets part of a legal professional’s document production needs since creating dynamic indexes and document review are outside the scope of the production. Manual production is time intensive, tedious and foregoes using tools that can make production faster and less expensive and is also a contributing factor to staff burnout and turnover.
eProduction
eProduction is an innovative online application that bridges the gap between manual production and eDiscovery, allowing litigators to streamline document upload, conversion, review, production and indexing without the added complication and prohibitive cost of eDiscovery.
Simply drag and drop your documents and an eProduction system will sort through your documents, convert them to pdfs and analyze their metadata to give you a running start on your privilege review.
eProduction applies the rules of discovery to your documents to give you predictive assistance on your privilege review. The use of appropriate algorithms to assist in a privilege review are highly recommended. Predictive tools make a privilege review more accurate by automating the application of discovery rules and by highlighting edge cases and thus make a privilege review far faster and more cost-effective.
eProduction makes it easy to review individual documents, emails and attachments for production privilege or irrelevancy. It also allows you to flag critical documents, mark with an additional legend (such as “Confidential”) and add notes and citations.
Once you’re done with review, your eProduction system downloads a complete set of your documents, numbered, organized and ready for production, along with a privilege log to serve on opposing counsel, a key documents folder and a complete index of all of the documents for your internal use.
eProduction is specifically designed to be simple to use, inexpensive and accessible so litigators with smaller cases can compete in an increasingly competitive environment.
Hallmarks of eProduction include simplicity (you can learn to use the entire system in under an hour), cost that scales to your case and no hidden costs in the form of contracts, storage costs or training.
Discovery Genie is an eProduction system.
eDiscovery
eDiscovery was created to address the growing complexity of document production and review due to the proliferation of online documents and communication.
It involves sophisticated tools that apply machine learning, algorithmic data analysis, and comprehensive searchability to multi-custodian data sets. Unfortunately, these tools—adapted as they are to the most complex cases—present cost and usability issues for the vast majority of cases.
Most eDiscovery products require extensive training, entail additional storage costs and require a dedicated employee to oversee the system.
While ideal for complex cases, eDiscovery is not proportional for the vast majority of cases and firms.
Discovery Genie was created when our founder needed a simple and powerful way to automate and expedite the tedious job of preparing and reviewing documents for disclosure and production for his solo firm. He needed something that fell between the time intensive slog of manual production and complication and expensive of eDiscovery. eProduction literally saved his firm which is why we encourage litigators involved in productions with 35,000 pages or less to give it a try.