The world of ediscovery is an entirely new language and substantive area for attorneys and the legal professionals supporting them. Researching case law is hard in ediscovery for two reasons: 1) most platforms require you to understand the issues you are searching for and put in the “right” search terms, and 2) no two judges use the same language in referring to or discussing ediscovery issues. Proportionality is a good example — some judges will outright refer to it as proportionality (so if you’ve searched for that, yeah for you), but some will refer to the undue burden of a particular request, or that a party has not shown a true need for the specific information. If the latter is true, you’re out of luck on your search.
What adds to the complexity is that discovery issues arise and need to be resolved quickly. Lawyers do not have weeks (or often days) to respond to a motion to compel, or to a letter outlining discovery deficiencies. Getting answers quickly in research is key, whether that’s in case law, rules or any knowledge based content that can help you understand the issue and what arguments are available to you.
To solve those problems, eDiscovery Assistant developed its own proprietary issue tagging structure to tag all of the content in our curated database with these issues to allow users to search based on ISSUES. And now, you can review our 90+ issues in a well organized Issues Dashboard that lets you see how we define and use each issue tag to apply it to content, as well as view related issue tags that may help you on your quest to find answers.
I’ve recorded a short three minute video showing you our new dashboard and how it works to let you get to the answers you need quickly:
The Issues Dashboard is live and available to all eDiscovery Assistant users to search for content across Rules, Case Law, Checklists and Forms and our eDiscovery Academy. You’ll get the best results by taking a few minutes to review the Issues Dashboard, see the issues we’ve identified and use those in combination to create a search that gets you to the content you need to answer your questions.
Our content team meets each week to review new case law and other content and determine if new Issue tags should be added. New tags are only added when there is content to support them. Keep in mind that we cannot add an issue tag for every single source of ESI, so you may need to use Search Terms together with your Issue search to get to specific content. For example, to find case law discussing a failure to produce data from Facebook Messenger, try searching for Failure to Produce and Instant Messaging, then putting Messenger in the Search Terms field. (Note that Facebook would not be a tag because Facebook refers to the social media platform, not the instant messaging tool called Messenger).
Have questions or need help formulating a search? Use the built in chat function in the lower right hand corner of the application to send us a question and one of our team will be back in touch shortly.
The Issues Dashboard is available to monthly and annual subscribers on any level plan. Let us know what you think and whether it helps reduce your research from hours to a few clicks. We think it will.
