Document Sharing in Remote Depositions | Esquire Deposition Solutions, LLC


In his groundbreaking 2013 book Tomorrow's Lawyers, legal futurist Richard Susskind predicted that technology would radically transform the legal profession over the next few decades. From the automation of routine legal tasks to the emergence of new legal service providers to the virtualization of personal proceedings, Susskind's assessments of the likely development of the legal profession have proven to be amazingly accurate.

Except maybe for the slow pace of change. After Susskind established a strong business model for why the legal profession should take advantage of the wider use of technology, he couldn't have expected a global pandemic in 2020 to get the legal profession to exploit the disruptive potential of technology in to transform an everyday life into reality.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a wake-up call for companies and industries that are falling behind in the digital transformation. For the legal profession, the pandemic is an opportunity to break away from convenient, habitual approaches to legal practice and to re-examine the benefits that technology can bring to lawyers and their clients.

Remote deposits are evolving

While it was downright wonderful that creative litigation attorneys were using zoom video conferencing and document sharing solutions like Dropbox or Box to conduct dumps and litigation during the COVID-19 pandemic, attorneys were quick to face the flaws in technology adoption created for the legal environment. These information technologies were not developed with litigation in mind. The tools currently used for remote dispute resolution are designed to facilitate collaboration within organizations of like-minded people - not for litigation between parties with conflicting interests.

Litigation attorneys rightly object if, during a personal trial, a witness's testimony is tampered with by a lawyer, notecards, or possibly a third party in the room. Yet, during a remote trial, a witness with an internet connection could potentially be tampered with by someone outside the room, secretly without a lawyer being notified. Ethics considerations and remote deposit protocols relieve a large portion of the burden of overseeing remote proceedings for fairness. However, wouldn't it be nice if the technology could offer more support than it does now if it could do the simulation better? positive characteristics of personal procedures? For example, wouldn't it be nice if the technology could remove external influences or draw the witness's attention to a precise page - and only this page - in a critical document?

New technologies for litigation

Fortunately, the technology used in remote depositions today meets these challenges. Many platforms, no longer limited to streaming video and audio, have features that allow lawyers to decide in real time which documents to share with the witness. Lawyers no longer have to worry about the security issues, costs, and potential strategic drawbacks of sending paper copies of documents to the witness in advance.

While litigators have broadly advocated remote filing, some within this group are reluctant to use remote technology to conduct a "document heavy" filing. Some fear that managing large numbers of digital exhibits during a deposit will be cumbersome and distracting. They fear losing a process advantage if they have to release documents prior to filing - documents that may not be presented during filing. And they are concerned that putting different programs together to make it work will not work well.

Added to this are the administrative challenges associated with the use of electronic exhibits. Exhibits need to be organized, sometimes shared and stamped, manually converted to a file format that can be viewed by all parties involved in the filing, and kept in an accessible but secure location. These are not trivial concerns, especially when it comes to high-stakes litigation involving numerous parties who may not be familiar with technology.

Finally, during a remote deposit, it is difficult for the attorney making the deposit to see exactly what part of an electronic exhibit the witness is viewing or to limit the witness's attention to a particular part of a document.

Mastering the exhibit challenge

These challenges have caused even the most tech-savvy lawyers to shy away from remote debris when a large amount of electronic exhibits are introduced during the deposit.

Certain platforms, such as electronic exhibit management platforms, have been developed for the sole purpose of managing electronic exhibits during a trial or remote deposit, including multiple deposits in a large case. These platforms address the biggest vulnerabilities for trial attorneys performing remote dumping: organization, ease of use during dumping, distribution, and control over what the witness can see or do with a particular exhibit.

The platforms automatically suggest the next exhibit number and rename exhibits to a generic document number and convert them to a common file format for the widest possible audience. Additionally, an attorney can allow the witness to comment on the exhibit and guide the witness through an exhibit by redirecting them to a specific page before asking them to review the document. All participants can see exactly what witnesses are seeing on their screens.

Meet the requirements of litigation attorneys

Process-specific solutions are much-needed enhancements to general document-sharing technologies that, while viable in some use cases, do not provide the safeguards and customer advocacy features that characterize the traditional personal justice system.


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https://businessservicesnews.ca/2021/04/28/document-sharing-in-remote-depositions-esquire-deposition-solutions-llc/

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