3.07 Database Conventions

There are two main categories of discovery: electronic and paper. Electronic discovery software extracts “metadata” from the file. The metadata contains fields and values ranging from email subject to the last print date of a spreadsheet. Different file types may yield different types metadata.

This means the firm may need to pay for bibliographic coding for certain kinds of electronic discovery to achieve a complete database. If 20% of a database has no author information, this will impact search results and confidence.

All electronic discovery yields “full text”. Full text is quite literally all the text inside a word processing or spreadsheet file or any other electronic files. Full text removes the need for OCR. Like OCR, full text does not provide bibliographic coding such as author and recipient. Full text will provide 100% accurate content where paper OCR may be 80% accurate or better, depending on the quality of the paper.

Load File Field Order

To help make life a little simpler for our legal teams, we outline the minimal fields that we require for each document, irrespective of origin, format or file type. This requires a certain amount of bibliographic coding for certain types of electronic discovery and all types of paper discovery.

As possible, the firm attempts to keep field order consistent for like types of databases. As such, the firm appreciates the vendor matching their load file to our field order. Our document reviewers expect to see the same fields in the same order for all databases. Please help us make this happen.

The exclusion of certain fields or their incorrect order may require Litigation Support to bill time to the client for correcting these problems. This is one reason why the Database Structure file (see 3.06) is so important.

While the vendor should provide the Firm with every field possible for electronic discovery, the following list from the law firm includes certain fields that we require at a minimum and in the following sequence. Depending upon the production or pre-production status of a collection, certain fields may contain no data.

Please refer to the Bibliographic Coding Instructions for bibliographic coding.

Note: These files, “load file field order” and “bibliographic coding instructions” should reside in the “DATA” and “PROJECT folders”, respectively, on the delivery.