In almost every litigation matter, there are a serious of emails between the parties and between the parties and people not involved in the dispute. These litigation-related emails can be important to the litigation and are often requested as part of the discovery process. Therefore, it is a good idea to get an early start on providing emails to the firm.
There are a few ways to provide litigation-related emails. One is to simply forward the email from your account to us. Although we will accept emails this way, it is a non-preferred method of sharing emails. The reasons for this are that (1) it is hard to tell if an email doesn’t come through or goes to a spam filter, (2) a large number of emails can make it difficult to review incoming emails from other clients, the courts, or opposing counsel, and (3) there is often information in the emails that needs to be redacted (any comments made to the firm and/or the date and time stamp of when it was forwarded to the firm).
With this in mind, there are a couple of other methods that are recommended. The first method will not be available to everyone but is great if you happen to already use Outlook and Adobe Acrobat. If you use Outlook and Adobe Acrobat, you can create a PDF portfolio of your emails by selecting the emails you want to include and right-clicking. From the right-click menu, you can select “Convert to PDF” to add all of these emails to a PDF document. If you discover additional emails to be included in that file, you can select the new email(s) and right-click again. This time from the right-click menu, click on “Append to PDF” and select the file you originally created with the other emails. The new email will now be added to this Adobe Portfolio.
The great advantage of using Adobe to export litigation-related emails is that the Adobe Portfolio will retain the date, subject, sender, and recipient information and can be sorted by these fields. As such, it is very easy to sort through a large number of emails and it takes time for you to provide the information. With this in mind, it may be advantageous for you to obtain Acrobat for this part of the process. Adobe often provides free trials of their software and if there isn’t a free trial, the software is billed on a monthly basis and you can cancel after pulling the email information.
If you don’t already use both Adobe Acrobat and Outlook, you can individually save individual emails either as a .msg file or a .pdf file. It is our preference that you provide .pdf files, but we will accept either form. If you upload the emails individually, we will ask that you provide the date, sender, and recipient for each email. This is so we can quickly review and sort the emails. If you do not want to take the time to provide this information for each email, you can bulk upload all of your email files by selecting the bulk upload option on the document upload form. Please note that if you upload the emails in bulk, we will have to spend additional time sorting and reviewing emails and you will be billed for that additional time.
Obtaining copies of emails can be a time-consuming process, which is why we are asking for you to get started early on in the process. Moreover, by providing us this information early, you are helping me to be as prepared as possible when handling your matter so that I can work towards the best possible outcome for your case.
