Since my last post a few months ago, a bit has changed in my life. I’m still at Xpera Group, but I have a new title: Director of Construction Consulting & Real Estate Advisory Services. Long story short, I oversee the consulting division, the largest of our profit centers, which includes all of our forensic services, as well as balcony inspections, market research, cost estimating and miscellaneous consulting services that leverage our collective experience for a better built environment.
That, along with my usual client work associated with high stakes complex claims, has kept me pretty busy.
Still, I’ve managed to write a few articles along the way, including one for the Xpera newsletter covering the basics of using eDiscovery for construction claims. Here’s an excerpt:
Regardless of the industry, electronic information is the medium of life in the modern world. While paper still matters, business is largely conducted and documented through exchanging electronically stored information, or ESI.
So, when disputes arise, the side who can best wrangle all that electronically stored data to present a compelling story will likely prevail…
The real power of eDiscovery software comes from the metadata that can be extracted from native files. “Native” simply means that the file is in the original format that was used by the software that created that file. Some examples of native files include .doc or .docx Word files, .xls or .xlsx Excel files, or .dwg CAD files. Email stored in native file formats such as .msg files are a boon for legal professionals, because unlike a printout of an email, eDiscovery software will extract the actual date an email was sent, the subject, any attachments, and the name, email address and company associated with the sender and recipients.
This allows someone to easily perform laser-focused searches and filtering across many hundreds of gigabytes of stored data in a short amount of time. Need to find every email sent by a certain sender during a specific time period? No problem. Need to pull together all the original CAD files for your architectural expert’s review, or the .xer P6 schedule files for delay analysis? It’s so easy a caveman could do it. Need to find every piece of supporting information associated with RFI No. 132? It likely takes only takes a few clicks of the mouse and the results are nearly instantaneous.Regardless of the industry, electronic information is the medium of life in the modern world. While paper still matters, business is largely conducted and documented through exchanging electronically stored information, or ESI.
Please visit the Xpera Blog to read the full article, and make sure to subscribe, if you haven’t done so already.
AEC Forensics 