The organisation and manipulation of electronic documents presents a mounting challenge to law firms and litigation support departments of all types and sizes. Recent major advances in software architecture and technology, along with the increasingly litigious corporate environment and the rising importance of e-disclosure, are factors that are pushing the legal profession towards new technology which maximises workflow efficiency and results.

Of course, technology of this nature is not new to the market. But my recent experiences – particularly conversations with in-house corporate legal departments – lead me to believe that many lawyers probably associate electronic litigation support solutions with severe problems.

It is well recognised that many popular and traditional litigation support software packages that aim at the organisation, searching and/or management of electronic documents suffer from several limitations. For instance, the software usually relies on a proprietary or limited (or even outmoded) database system and requires considerable time for training, resulting in many features only being used by the most technically savvy support staff. Clearly this is not acceptable after a firm has dedicated significant time and money to enable the investment.

Also, many software solutions in this domain are designed around a legacy application structure that no longer fits today's demanding litigation environment. Typically, systems are likely to be limited to only a few document image types, such as single-page .tiff images, and users are restricted to static folders to store documents, and static coded fields to describe documents.

But one of the main criticisms of old-style software is that it has a confusing or even cost-prohibitive licensing structure in which web components, viewers, advanced features and/or other components must be purchased separately. This goes firmly against the flow of today's best-practice IT investments (and not only in the legal profession), which tend to focus on the 'software as a service' model, allowing firms to avoid upfront costs, hidden extras and even hardware investments.

Aside from the cost model, legal departments should also be aware that today's advanced e-discovery and hosting services have also eliminated most of the technical limitations.

Sophisticated document and business process management tools now enable litigation support platforms to provide a full 'end-to-end' solution, so law firms do not have to outsource subsets of the critical litigation process. Legal departments should be demanding that the database back-end provides open, maximum flexibility and scalability for customer document libraries and associated data. Intuitive interfaces should make solutions user-friendly for all legal staff, and should handle more than 40 different document image types. Importantly, systems should be 'searchable' using a Google-style function and the document library will be completely customisable.

In my experience, many in-house legal departments are not harnessing the new breed of evidence and litigation management software that is available to them. The process of quickly collecting, reviewing and producing any amount and type of discovery information can be made so much easier thanks to the major shift in technology development, adding obvious efficiencies in the current, complex litigation environment. n

Simon Stammers is UK sales director at Anacomp Limited.