[anodyne33]

I'm in eDiscovery, we host trial databases in a really stout and intuitive review platform. My clients can, after they've done their searching and culled for relevance and privilege, browse through the document viewer and look at either the text with highlighted search hits or the native rendering of all their documents. All of their coding and tagging of documents is right there in the side panel of the doc viewer. There's hardly a week that goes by that an attorney or paralegal DOESN'T call and ask us for PDFs of their documents. Until a few years ago it wasn't unusual for someone to call and ask paper copies of hundreds of pages at a time to review.

The legal world is outstandingly slow to embrace better solutions in technology.

[gamblor956]

Paper copies don't require an online connection or a charged device. They're easy to mark up. They're easier on the eyes. They're easier to share in a trial war room environment.

The technology world can be outstandingly bad at understanding its target markets.

[geofft]

Can I access your platform / document viewer offline?

[anodyne33]

No, and of course, that's the rub.

[joshspankit]

Seems like a gap in the market if someone steps in with offline sync (even just one-way) and the ability to securely access files from a next-day delivered USB stick.

[anodyne33]

We've done that for special case scenarios. The last review tool we used was in a mixed Linux/Windows environment and we had a client in jail awaiting trial so we built a laptop to run everything and our PM visited him weekly to update his copy of the DB locally (no internet access in the pen). The biggest sticking point is that it's not uncommon to get to 4-6 TB on one of our databases and it takes a bunch of processors and memory to run the software, but I smell a development opportunity now that you mention it.

[geofft]

One, you can get an external 6 TB hard drive for like $100. At attorney levels of money, that's entirely reasonable.

Two, clearly in the pre-computer world, attorneys were not reviewing 6 terabytes of actual data for discovery. What makes it so big? Is it that you have scanned PDFs in image format (such that it's a reasonable number of pages printed out), or is it that you have new types of data like electronic records that simply wouldn't have been picked up in the old days?

[joshspankit]

As per geofft’s question, I’m also curious: what type of files are in a 6TB case DB?

[masonic]

BTW, I love your About[0] line.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=anodyne33