Ride the Lightning
Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
Litigation Paralegal, LLC Applauds Digital WarRoom Pro
May 17, 2011
Keith Slyter of Litigation Paralegals, LLC wrote me recently, strongly endorsing Digital WarRoom Pro as having met the Ernie Challenge that e-discovery expert Tom O'Conner recently propounded. It was a fascinating note which he revised in the light of my many questions (thanks Keith). Here it is for your perusal – I'd like to hear about larger data sets or problems that anyone else may have experienced – obviously Keith is a big fan based on what he has seen thus far. Here's his note:
Megan Miller with Digital War Room turned me onto your blog and site. After reading through your site, Craig Ball’s site and then the Ernie Challenge, http://theerniechallenge.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/to-edna-and-beyond-the-ernie-challenge/ I felt compelled to write a response and tout Digital War Room as a realistic solution for small to mid-sized law firms and cases. At a price point of $895 for a single user and ~$4,000 for a multi-user solution, it is something I can recommend to clients with a straight face.
They are already stunned and amazed when I pull up in a 43 foot Mobile Litigation Command Center, so I don’t want their eyes to glaze over by proposing they pay me $50,000 to “process” their native client documents before they can even start reviewing them.
Having tested Digital War Room Pro, http://www.digitalwarroom.com/, I would opt to implement Digital War Room Remote or the Server Version for multiple users and reviewers in different locations.
This is almost exactly the situation I am encountering in my Mobile Litigation Command Center (Mobile War Room) with small to medium sized firms. The traditional options were not working, but Digital War Room is the best option out there for this situation. I use a self-standing NAS with 2TB storage to house the data and clients can access the information a couple of different ways.
It does everything soup to nuts and is pretty easy to set up. In fact, my first install took 50 minutes start to finish, including running a full production of 1100 TIFF images and associated OCR files. The native files were in Word, .pst and .pdf. Everything was converted from the native to TIFF image, OCR and Bates stamped after performing a deNist process, although there were only 2 duplicates in the production. Load files were generated for Concordance and Summation. The most difficult and time consuming part was loading SQL Server Express on a laptop to get everything to run correctly.
Email attachments kept the parent/child relationship and the TIFF image production kept the attachments in order after the emails after the conversion was complete.
Having used Law PreDiscovery in the past, Digital War Room was quite impressive and is a seamless one stop solution. I did not need to use any other program to review, tag, mark privilege or to convert and produce in a TIFF/OCR format as was agreed upon during the 26(f) conference.
This is the best usable solution I have found for small to medium firms who have some tech experience or who want to hire me to implement and train them on the best practices for using this product and making sense out of their review of native documents and production of those documents in whatever format they have agreed upon with the other side.
One important note is that this was a very small collection of documents to be reviewed and produced. I am going to test on a larger data set before I start recommending this to larger firms or for larger case, but from what I see so far GGO may have actually nailed it and cracked the per GB nut as they tout. We shall see after I do a start to finish on a more complex matter, but I am excited about the possibilities and cost savings to my clients.
The other thing I need to test is taking an existing Concordance or Summation dataset and converting/loading/dumping it into Digital War Room to see if this will be my ongoing solution for small to medium firms on all their small to medium cases. One downfall may be that the folder structure for cases is only 2 or 3 folders deep. Probably not too much of a concern for small to medium sized cases, but for complex cases with multiple productions from multiple sources it could present a challenge for quickly finding a production, but maybe only if you have 100’s of folders going at one time and the naming nomenclature is not understood.
I am still working on how best to use this during trial with Trial Director and Sanction, but I think we have figured that out as well. I just need a trial to test it in.
Anyway, well done on your blog and website. Great information.
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