When I first started creating hyperlinked electronic briefs (EBriefs) in the late 1990’s, very few litigators had heard of them or knew how effective they could be as a form of presentation advocacy. (For information on these topics please visit my previous blogs on Hyperlinked EBriefs). They were somewhat complicated to create and took anywhere from 4 days to two weeks to complete, depending on the length of the underlying documents. So the early impediments to EBriefs were threefold: awareness, time to create and the high cost.
This is the primary reason that the early use of EBrief technology focused on the Practice of Appellate Law. Federal and state appeals courts have extensive rules in place that provide a regimented timeline for a briefing schedule, unlike the trial courts. The document population was fixed from the beginning of the appeals process and the established schedules allowed service bureaus the time to create a quality end product. This led to the establishment of a dedicated core group of EBrief users, and just as importantly, a group of judges who began to understand the advantages that the technology offered to the courts. The question for early providers like me has been how to expand the market of users.
After over 12 years in the industry it boiled down to the three original impediments; increasing acceptance by firms, clients and courts, shortening the time frame to create them and lowering the cost to produce them. Easier said than done. But in fact, that is exactly what has been accomplished over the last decade. We have spent a lot of time providing seminars, webinars and CLE programs to lawyers and judges to demystify the technology so people understand their utility. We have spent countless hours refining our internal processes, developing new software and training staff so that the service can be delivered on a timelier basis. What used to take my team 5-6 days to produce can now be achieved in 24 hours so the types of cases they can be effectively used on have grown. All of these improvements have translated into lowering the cost to produce a quality product.
What does this all mean?
Focusing on the original core impediments and solving the issues have changed the application of this technology, once reserved for the appeals process. It now makes perfect sense to present your documents at all levels of advocacy, from pretrial motions through post-trial hearings and everything in between. We now regularly file EBriefs for clients at all levels of federal and state courts, throughout the entire litigation process. They are as effective in a discovery motion as they are in a patent filing or a complicated post-trial filing. The Chart below is a visual representation of all areas of the law where EBriefs improve the presentation of your filing by the court.
Remember some key facts when determining how you can improve your method of presentation to the court and provide the most effective advocacy for your clients. Don’t take the chance that all of your hard work on a trial or set of briefing papers might go to waste because a judge gets lost in a voluminous, dry paper record.
- Over 90 % of all cases never go to trial and are decided on the full briefing schedule alone.
- Up to 1/3 of all cases are modified and/or reversed on appeal.
- Courts rarely have the opportunity to review all the documentation submitted in paper form due to volume and time restraints.
- Electronic Briefs increase the effectiveness of court review by providing instant access to all cited documents in context.
In addition to the more traditional legal uses mentioned above, the same technology has been effectively used to create electronic versions of the following for improved document access:
- Trial record reviews
- Preparation for oral argument
- SEC filings
- Investigative reports
- Business transaction records
- Syndicated debt projects
Clearly, hyperlinked EBrief technology has gone far beyond the original Appeals market.
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