In-House Processing in Law Firms

As the economy tightens law firms have been looking to maximize profits and cut costs wherever possible.  One of the items that has been a steady topic within law firms is whether or not to process data internally for their cases.  Many firms have chosen to use in-house copy centers to address their paper needs.  Can processing data be any harder?  The simple answer is yes.
 
The problem lies not as much in the law firms ability to hire qualified individuals (though this is not easy) as the issue of error or oversight when processing the data that lays direct culpability to the law firm for these actions.  The possibilities of error or oversight are many, but just to name a couple; I’ll cover dates and fields.
 
Dates. Data from the corporate client is typically collected in a loose fashion.  The dates are often scrambled or replaced with the Windows system dates of the collection/gathering date instead of actual dates for such metadata fields as Last Modified, Last Accessed or Create Date.  Having these dates be saved as the date of the data gathering will be completely incorrect information.  Employing a hierarchy of the dates that apply to the files to be reviewed is often paramount to their importance.  Other date related problems are associated to normalizing the time zone of emails.  If this is not known and the wrong time zone is chosen, context and persons-of-interest actions can either be improperly diminished or elevated.
 
Fields. One of the most common and incorrect phrase we hear when asking which metadata fields to include in the load file after processing is “Just the standard ones.”  Oooff.  That is like saying I want the standard haircut.  There are a large number of variations that can be either under or over-inclusive.  The bigger concern is the incorrect mapping of fields that have not been normalized from dataset to dataset.  If one load file has Date_Mod and another Date_Modify, they will not map to the same field in the review tool unless specifically amended to do so (which is often bypassed), so when a production set is generated from a date range of docs specific to a matter using Date_Mod, those docs listed WITHIN the range but using Date_Modify will not hit and are wrongly held from production.  If and when the opposing counsel find this out, trouble ensues.
 
Several other issues related to software and hardware infrastructure, exception handling, dealing with uncommon file types, having the resource of an entire company/vendor at your disposal versus 3-4 individuals as well as errors or oversights may lead to the decision to process data internally at the law firm both risky and a substantial undertaking.