Understanding Legal Information and E-Discovery
"December 2006 amendments to U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) are the most recent in a series of compliance mandates that IT and business alike must observe. FRCP govern court procedures in civil lawsuits. What differentiates FRCP from earlier mandates such as 2002’s Sarbanes-Oxley Act is the huge volume of textual information involved. (Other nations have similar legal and financial control mandates.) The ingredients include lots of text, exacting procedures, tight time frames and significant cost pressures. The result is widespread legal-sector adoption of text technologies to facilitate litigation related processes: the collection, management, review and delivery of electronic stored information (ESI) that is or may be pertinent to lawsuits.
Information technology (IT) plays an important role in the legal sector just as in other industries. There are typical operational functions such as time accounting and billing, and also litigation-related case management. It’s in management of evidentiary materials for lawsuits and of legal information – searchable legal code, case law and directories – that text technologies can really shine."
