Monday, April 13, 2009

Summation tip of the week

I've started sending out weekly tips for using that ol' stalwart of litigation technology - Summation iBlaze. As not everyone likes having their email cluttered with yet more stuff, even if it is high quality, informative, educational material like I send out (ahem!!), I thought I'd put them up here as well.

For those of you that have had my weekly tip via email and would rather read it here (or not at all), just email me with "Unsubscribe - Summation Tip of the Week" and I'll be sure that you're taken off that email list. Be sure you let me know if you'd rather never hear from me again (in which case I'll head off into a quiet corner to sob) or just don't want to get the Summation Tips.

Summation Tip of the Week No. 1

Using Summation for electronic exchange of documents

This week’s tip explains a simple way to use Summation to exchange documents electronically with opposing counsel.

How does it work?

A Summation Briefcase will take the documents you want to send to opposing counsel (usually as an Affidavit of Documents) and package up the images, along with their document information from the columns that you choose into one file. You can then burn the file to CD or (if it’s small enough) send it via email to opposing counsel for them to import into their own Summation case database.

Pros and Cons

Some advantages of using a Summation Briefcase include:

  • No need to print out all your documents, or make copies
  • Reduces postage costs
  • You can redact the images if necessary and Summation will permanently apply the redactions in the Briefcasing process
  • You can select which columns (and therefore what information) to send to opposing counsel
  • You can give your documents new, consecutive numbers that disguise any “gaps” in the Bates numbers
  • Opposing counsel can integrate your Briefcase with their own documents in Summation, or view it in a separate Summation database

Some things to bear in mind with Summation Briefcases:

  • You need to have Summation iBlaze to create and directly access Summation Briefcases
  • Summation Briefcases are only good for up to 20,000 images or so – you might not be able to create or view ones that are larger than this
  • If you’re going to use Summation Briefcases to exchange Affidavits of Documents, get opposing counsel’s agreement ahead of timeTry to match the way you enter information in the columns with opposing counsel. You can discuss this at your Meet and Confer or include it in your Discovery Plan
  • Be careful about including OCR - it can reveal text in a redacted document

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Really wonderful piece of information and I appreciate it that you share something so useful with the readers of this blog.thanks

Debbie Westwood and Steve Treible said...

Thank you! There will be more tips coming . . .

prd said...

If I have a lot of info loaded into Sharepoint as a database, such as name of party, date info is due, interrogatory question, response to interrogatory, who answered the interrogatory, etc. so that all users in the company can access it and place info there for me to use to transfer to summation, can I use the Sharepoint data and transfer to Summation without having to totally re-enter ("code") the info in Summation thus not have to duplicate work?

Debbie Westwood and Steve Treible said...

Hi prd,

I'm no Sharepoint expert, but in general terms if you can export the information in the database to a delimited text file (such as comma-separated), you can most certainly import the data into Summation.

If you need extra tips on how to do that, please contact me via email (see our website at www.intechgration.com).