Litigants are wasting money with the status quo. Not because of the format, per se, but because of a lack of reasonably good NLP-based search and summary tools. Much money is spent paying people to review transcripts by hand, when the bulk of the heavy lifting could be done with software. I know the market well enough to manage the product development and sell it but lack the NLP skills to build it. Anyone interested in talking about it feel free to hit me up.

You don't understand how large court cases work.

You're obligated to provide everything to the other side, doing so in a format that requires them to have a small army of people to read every line instead of being able to do a simple text search is exactly the point. There are even companies that specialize in taking large amounts of electronic data (email is a good example) and printing every single page so that opposing council ends up with enough paper to fill a room.

Edit: I also have no idea how you'd sell a product that considerably reduces billable hours.

Exactly. Large cases often produce box after box of documents and frequently supply documents not related that were not requested. It is a game of burying them in paper because if there is a smoking gun (document that is critical to their side) they may not see it or when they find it, they have paid tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees for the attorneys to find it in the many boxes of documents.

Often times one litigant can starve the less funded litigant out. Successfully starving a litigant out results in favorable settlements for the offending litigant.

You could sell it to plaintiffs lawyers and the increasing universe of firms that do fixed fee or capped arrangements. Plaintiffs lawyers have huge incentives to minimize per-case investment, but they don't use much legal tech. Which is pretty great evidence of how well it works.

Also you can obviously search PDFs. People read every line of deposition transcripts because they're looking for admissions (places where the deponent slips up and reveals useful information).

> I also have no idea how you'd sell a product that considerably reduces billable hours.

I think you'd want to sell it to the folks who are paying for those billable hours.

You sell it to firms who would like to compete on price while showing clients that they do so due to their use of cutting-edge technology

They're not the ones using it though

The nature means that you'd only reduce your adversary's costs, not your own.

> I also have no idea how you'd sell a product that considerably reduces billable hours.

Hmm.. perhaps, if they can force the opposition to use similar tech, then they can promise faster resolutions.(That's still assuming both the parties wouldn't mind it much, but don't see it happening).

> There are even companies that specialize in taking large amounts of electronic data (email is a good example) and printing every single page so that opposing council ends up with enough paper to fill a room.

Surely there's a limit to how awkward you can make this for the other side? Why would the courts allow making it intentionally difficult for one side to gather evidence to help their case?

For example, I'm sure they wouldn't allow you to deliver the documents on numbered post-it notes, one sentence per note and in a random order.

I would have thought the court would insist the material is delivered in the most practical format (e.g. emails as text files or in a searchable database) and both sides get access to the same format unless there are special circumstances.

I would imagine they are stuck back a few decades when delivering documents on paper was standard and nothing unusual. So printed paper is a minimal acceptable format. Since part of the legal battle is to also drain the other side's resources it would make sense then to go by the absolute allowed minimum and nothing more.

If delivering documents on posted notes was allowed surely they'd be companies specializing in that.

Seems like requiring an electronic copy when one is available originally would go a long way. Is it court's prerogative, or do we need a Congressional amendment for this to become commonplace?

It is common place. I've never gotten paper discovery in a civil case. Opposing counsel sends links to a secure download site, sometimes a CD or USB. The documents are sent as natives plus TIFF images of each page plus metadata. We load them into an ediscovery platform where everything is OCR-ed and indexed. Whoever reviews it works within the platform where documents can be searched, tagged, marked up, etc.

This is where us old-timers go into get-off-my-lawn mode: "You kids today don't know how easy you have it for document discovery — in my day we spent days and weeks in hot, dusty warehouses looking through boxes of mouldering paper files ...."

See https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp

I thought this happens only on TV. Why the hell would you not require by law that electronic information in the best available format must be supplied if available???

How do you define "best available format" though? There's a rabbit hole of complexity just in this single sentence!

So are you saying it's sensible that we're stuck with emails printed on reams of paper because it's too hard to define a better spec? There is really no reason for digital files not to be mandated in 2017 except "lol bureaucracy." Frankly, if someone only has access to paper files they should be required to scan them. As is, at least as much work is being done in the opposite direction (printing tons of paper) which is just ridiculous.

> So are you saying it's sensible that we're stuck with emails printed on reams of paper because it's too hard to define a better spec?

Oh, it's not sensible but I do appreciate the huge gap between a tossed out "lol, use digital" and reality that people blithely ignore. As a trivial example, marking up emails printed on paper can be a lot easier than doing it digitally.

> Frankly, if someone only has access to paper files they should be required to scan them.

How do you prove the scans are correct? Presumably the paper files have some kind of chain of custody going on - how do you enforce that for digital files? What resolution do you enforce? What colour settings? Or B&W? Or shades of grey, even? What happens to the forensic dots that printers add when you scan a document? They might be vital evidence.

It's fine to just "scan them" in an office but you really want to avoid any kind of potential data loss when you're talking about evidence in a court case.

And dipping into the wilder reaches of fantasy, how do you guard against things like steganography being used to pass information secretly? Or avoid viruses / trojans / zipbombs / whatnots?

I work on large lawsuits for a living. You obviously don't understand the point I made.

There is a significant industry based on e-discovery that never sees, or requires actual paper. Much more likely is an inhalation of the contents of a custodian's hard drive, or the ingestion of a full PST file (MS Outlook email form) into a system, or downloading email inboxes from Office 365 or Gmail.

Once ingested, the documents are searched for words or phrases, tagged as relevant, privileged, or non-responsive. See the FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) for discussion of electronic documents in discovery.

Not only are courts expecting parties in lawsuits to supply documents in electronic form, there are are now rules in some courts tailored to TAR, or technical assisted review, which often means LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis).

So the idea of dropping tons of paper on the hapless opponent is an idea that is practically of antiquity, dating back to the MCI/ATT lawsuits. Large lawsuits simply don't work that way anymore.