Litigation is not a 9-to-5 process. Collaboration between law firms and in-house counsel, or between partner law firms, takes place 24 hours a day, seven days a week, depending on the specific needs of the case and on the work habits of the lawyers involved.

Prior to the advent of the Internet, collaboration was a tricky, time-consuming procedure. The discovery process, which forced lawyers and clients to sift through thousands, or sometimes millions, of pages of documents to find the data most relevant to their case, was a particularly maddening task.

Lawyers needed a central repository to access and share information. In most cases, that repository was the client itself. The client stored all the information, either in boxes or on their network. To access that data, lawyers often needed to be connected to that network. Any problems that arose needed to occur during the client’s workday in order to be quickly solved. If an outside lawyer had difficulty accessing client information at night or during the weekend, they were forced to stop working until the client’s information technology pros returned to work. Most companies don’t staff their help desks around the clock, if they even have help desks at all.

To mitigate this worry, many clients arranged in-person meetings, flying in lawyers and litigation support personnel from around the country to manage the discovery process in a seemingly orderly setting.

Except the discovery process itself is inherently disorderly. Data that might seem relevant could, after further inspection, prove worthless. Litigation support personnel might simply overlook a nugget of vital information as they sifted through boxes of paper. The client might suddenly be hit with an unexpected million-page request, forcing them to re-convene the discovery team, book new flights for the out-of-towners and quickly pile expense upon expense.

The discovery process was ultimately a costly exercise in high-stakes hoop-jumping. What could go wrong inevitably did go wrong, as any lawyer with discovery experience could regale you with tales of woe.

The Internet changed all that.

ASPs And The Modern Lawyer

An application service provider (ASP) is a company that gives other companies access to applications and information via the Internet. ASPs store the relevant data or applications on their own networks, rather than on a customer’s network. To access data via an ASP, lawyers do not have to be hooked into their client’s networks. They merely need access to the Internet itself.

ASPs have been around for years now. The dot-com boom in the mid-to-late ‘90s quickly spurred the creation of an entire cottage industry of companies eager to help businesses navigate their way through the web’s murky waters. But the natural reluctance of legal professionals to change the way they did business made true acceptance a slow process.

However, the Internet forced legal professionals to reconsider their love of tradition. The Internet made e-mail possible, helping to keep millions of web surfers worldwide in constant, informal touch.

However, as a business communications tool e-mail quickly caused considerable legal difficulties. An e-mail is fundamentally no different than a memo on company letterhead. It is discoverable data and potentially relevant to a lawsuit (as executives from Enron to Merrill Lynch learned firsthand).

In many organizations, upwards of 90 percent of data is never actually printed, but nearly all data is created and managed electronically. ASPs give lawyers the very tool they need to handle this explosion of electronic information.

Benefits include:

Accessibility: The Internet is always on. Unfettered access to information means lawyers can proceed through the discovery process without regard for traditional time constraints. The client ultimately dictates who can have access to the stored data. ASPs also staff their help desks on a round-the-clock basis; if a problem arises, it can be quickly solved.

Speed: At the outset of a review, documents are uploaded to the ASP. Depending on the project requirements, lawyers can review online documents in a variety of ways, such as using search terms to establish relevancy. A complex discovery review might traditionally have taken four to five months to complete. ASPs allow users to complete those reviews in two weeks.

Organization: ASPs are valuable not only for data-sharing, but for organizing the shared information. ASPs typically allow lawyers to sort and folder documents by a variety of methods, such as issue. Common-sense issue categorization streamlines the discovery process and allows lawyers to strategize more effectively.

Consistency: ASPs ensure that all of the legal professionals involved in the discovery process are working from a single set of documents. In the event a document becomes privileged, or is found to contain trade secrets, everyone involved in the case preparation will be immediately made aware. Lawyers used to work with countless boxes stuffed with photocopied documents. ASPs are a cleaner and more consistent tool for reviews and production. Consistency minimizes the risk of court sanctions.

Cost: ASPs customers save considerable money on the cost of bringing a law firm in-house to manage the discovery process, as well as the attendant costs of document preparation and production. Additional savings include the cost of storing and maintaining litigation-specific documents on their own network, buying scanning and coding equipment, hosting and travel, and the admittedly nebulous – but no less real – money saved via increased efficiency.

Litigation is a month-to-month issue. When one case is done, it’s on to the next. ASPs allow users to store or remove data as needed.

Once litigation professionals become acclimated to the ASP process, they carry those lessons from case to case, slowly but surely improving the efficiency of the discovery process.

The avalanche of electronic data has added a new dimension to the discovery process. More and more law firms are using ASPs as an integral part of their litigation strategy. ASPs provide an invaluable service with regard to case management. The well-prepared, tactically-minded litigator — on either side of the aisle — will almost always emerge successful.

Dave Barrett is executive vice president of sales and management forConnecticut-based Daticon, Inc., which provides document management services.