Legal document management systems serve a different purpose than ediscovery platforms, although both deal with documents and files. Brett Burney draws from years of ediscovery consulting experience to explain the difference between the two — and why they’re not interchangeable.
A legal document management system (DMS) and an ediscovery document review platform serve completely different purposes, even though they both deal with “documents.” Legal document management systems like NetDocuments and iManage manage your firm’s internal work product, but they were never built to preserve and produce evidence for a litigation matter.
An ediscovery platform like Nextpoint is specifically designed to preserve metadata for a defensible chain of custody, offer coding and tagging options for review, apply bona fide redactions, and generate functional production sets. As a litigator, it’s critical to make sure you’re using the proper tool for your task. Here are five distinctions to help you know the difference.
1. A DMS is for internal work product; an ediscovery platform is for electronic evidence
When you draft a letter, memo, or pleading, you have to store those files somewhere. That’s exactly what a document management system (DMS) is designed for. Think of a DMS as a digital filing cabinet for the firm’s internal work product. A DMS ensures that everyone in the firm can easily find, share, and collaborate on internal documents while maintaining version controls and client-matter organization.
When you receive electronic evidence from your client, you have a duty to preserve that electronically stored information (ESI) for review and production according to the applicable rules of evidence and civil procedure. eDiscovery platforms like Nextpoint are specifically designed to preserve file metadata and maintain chain of custody. They also provide advanced tools for searching and filtering, tagging, redaction, and creating production sets.
2. A DMS is for altering documents; an ediscovery platform is for preserving documents
When you’re drafting a document, it’s often helpful to go through several “versions” before it’s finalized. A DMS is excellent at tracking those versions and even enables you to collaborate with colleagues. These platforms allow individuals to check-out/check-in documents for different work options and to avoid content conflicts. A DMS tracks the entire lifecycle of a document from its creation to disposition.
The primary function of an ediscovery review platform is to properly preserve the electronic evidence that gets loaded into it. While a DMS is designed to host documents created by your firm, ediscovery platforms store data created by clients and outside parties that is entrusted to you as part of a litigation matter. This is not your firm’s data — this is client data, and you have a duty to ensure there are no changes, edits, or alterations to this evidence from the time it comes into your possession until you produce it to opposing parties.
eDiscovery review platforms not only prohibit any changes to a document’s metadata or content; they also provide a full audit trail for files so you can show a defensible chain of custody for all evidence.
3. A DMS is for profiling documents; an ediscovery platform is for tagging documents
When you create a document and save it in your firm’s DMS, you complete a “profile” which includes the title, author, and version of the document along with the appropriate client and matter numbers. Depending on how your DMS is set up, the profile may also assign creation and modification dates, version number, document type, library storage location, etc. Firms can also set up custom fields in their DMS to capture additional information. Users can search across all this information.
When you review evidence for production in a litigation matter, you are typically determining if the document is responsive (or not) to a production request. If it’s not responsive or relevant, then you can tag the document as “Not Responsive” and move on. If the document is responsive, you tag it as such, and then determine if it is privileged or confidential (and tag it appropriately).
Nextpoint allows you to customize the review with any tags that would be helpful, such as privilege or redaction reasons, issue designations, the production request that a document is responsive to, and more. At the end of the review period, you can quickly filter to the documents that have been tagged as responsive but not privileged, which is what you produce to the opposing party.
4. A DMS tracks multiple versions; an ediscovery review platform recognizes duplicates
An important task of a DMS is to track all “versions” of a document so you’re not constantly having to add “John’s second version-V.5-draft03-FINAL” in your document’s file name. You don’t have to manually track which version you’re working on or sharing with colleagues. You can reference or revert to prior versions at any time.
In contrast, collecting electronic evidence from clients often means you get the same email or document from multiple custodians. You don’t want to waste your precious time looking at the same content over and over. That’s why ediscovery review platforms like Nextpoint will deduplicate files upon ingestion and remove them from the review set (while still properly preserving them for potential production). Deduplication is an essential component of an ediscovery review platform to reduce time and unnecessary effort.
5. A DMS allows for transparent content; an ediscovery review platform allows for redactions
When a firm invests in a DMS, it’s to enable everyone in the firm to create, share, and collaborate on documents. Files are stored so that they can be freely viewed and edited (unless locked down) since the documents are being created by the firm.
When producing files in litigation, it’s often necessary to redact sensitive, confidential, or personally identifiable information. You cannot apply redactions in a DMS — you have to make a copy of the document and use a separate tool like Adobe Acrobat Pro. This creates unnecessary copies, and many people fail to properly redact when using these manual methods.
An ediscovery review platform such as Nextpoint provides built-in tools for redacting content and even provides safety measures to ensure files are not produced without fully redacting the sensitive content.
Use the Right Tool for the Right Data
Even though both a DMS and an ediscovery review platform deal with “documents,” they are designed to fulfill different functions, and it is imperative for litigators to understand the distinctions. Many firms, out of habit or convenience, will store electronic evidence in a DMS because “that’s where documents go,” but that commingles electronic evidence with your firm’s work product.
A DMS helps your firm create and organize internal work product; an ediscovery platform allows litigators to effectively preserve, analyze, review, and produce electronic evidence. (Check out this table that sums up the key differences between the two.) As a litigator, you owe it to your practice, your firm, and your clients to use the right tool for the right data.
See the Difference for Yourself
Now that you know what an ediscovery platform can do that your DMS simply can’t, the next step is seeing it in action. Nextpoint is purpose-built for litigators — with defensible chain of custody, built-in redactions, deduplication, and production-ready review tools all in one place.
Ready to use the right tool for the right data? Talk to one of our experts and let us show you how Nextpoint can simplify your next matter from intake to production.
