Litigation support is the process of providing consultation and support services to attorneys in regards to current and pending cases. The type of support services provided will depend on the needs of each individual attorney or firm.

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For the purpose of litigation, an image is digital photocopy created by scanning a paper-based document or by printing an electronic document to an image format such as TIFF or PDF.

Tagged Image File Format (abbreviated TIFF) is a file format for storing images. The TIFF format is the standard in document imaging and document management systems using CCITT Group IV 2D compression. In high-volume storage scanning, documents are typically scanned in black and white to conserve storage capacity utilizing about 50 kB of storage at 300 ppi.

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for open document exchange. PDF was officially released as an open standard on July 1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization.

There are three types of PDF files:
1. Normal, or Pure, PDF
This is the most common type of PDF and is created by a conversion tools such as Adobe Acrobat or Nuance PDF Converter. This type of PDF contains the full text of the page with appropriate coding to provide an accurate print of the original document.

2. Image Only PDF
This PDF will be created from one or more images usually as a result of scanning a document directly to PDF or by converting a TIFF image to PDF. This type of PDF does not contain any searchable text.

3. Searchable PDF
A searchable PDF is an image PDF that additionally contains a hidden layer of text generated by an OCR engine. This enables the file to be searched in the same fashion as the normal PDF.

Optical character recognition, more commonly referred to as OCR, is an electronic translation of images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into searchable, or editable, text. While perfect translation would require human intervention, high-quality images can produce up to 95%-99% accuracy. Documents produced by a laser printer with standard fonts on white paper would likely produce high-quality images when scanned.

In the civil litigation discovery process, documents are often produced between parties on CD or DVD because the cost of production and delivery of documents on disk is so much less than production and delivery of paper. When these documents are printed, or returned to paper form, it's called "blowback".

Coding is the process whereby an individual examines an image of a document and populates the fields of the case database. The term “auto-coding” refers to a software process of using OCR to populate fields in a database. While improving, this technology is only appropriate for certain document collections where time is a major concern.

Objective coding is a relatively simple process of examining a document and filling in database fields with searchable and sortable information about the document. Objective coding does not necessarily require familiarity with the particulars of the case.

Subjective coding requires a deeper understanding of the issues in the case in order to properly identify hot documents and those which will cause issues as the case progresses.

You can fit approximately 18,000 letter-sized, 300 dpi black and white images on a single CD; about 6 case of paper. Depending on the file format, you can expect approximately 75,000 pages of native electronic documents on a single CD; about 25 cases of paper. Almost 7 times that will fit on a single layer DVD. With the advent of Blu-Ray, you can save a forest.