Please enjoy this blog authored by @Brett Burney, Vice President eDiscovery, NextPoint Law Group and Stephanie Clerkin, Director of Litigation Support, Korein Tillery LLC.
From Sticky Notes to Predictive Coding – How the Litigation Support Profession has Transformed Through the Years
Once upon a time, documents were paper. Not a Microsoft Word generated document printed to paper, we mean someone took a crisp, blank sheet of paper and either handwrote their “document” or rolled it into an old-fashioned, manual typewriter. These documents had to be collected for litigation and the legal team would manually flag relevant items with colored tabs and sticky notes and Bates stamp each page for production (ker-chunk!). Individual documents were organized in folders which were then put into banker’s boxers or filing cabinets.
Creeping into the 1990’s and inching into the new millennium, the concept of a “document” was something we digitally created on a computer although we still stored those documents in what looked like “folders” on our screens. Whether a document came from a typewriter or computer, we still worked primarily in paper when it came to litigation. Service providers would take the paper documents, scan them into a digitized TIFF image, and then “code” each file with author, date, document type, and source. All this information was stored in specialized legal database or image viewing applications, such as Summation, and Concordance, and Opticon , where reviewers could search and view the document and determine whether it was relevant and/or privileged. The relevant documents would be produced as TIFF images sometimes accompanied by the text for searching, and a “load file” with all the associated (minimal) coding (Begin Bates, End Bates, Source, Text Location, etc.).
Amended Rules and Multiple Data Sources
The litigation landscape underwent a fundamental transformation with the emergence of electronic discovery by the landmark 2006 Federal Rules of Civil Procedure amendments. These changes formally recognized electronically stored information (ESI) as discoverable, forcing legal teams to develop new competencies for handling digital evidence. Courts began expecting attorneys to understand concepts like data preservation, native file formats, and metadata—technical considerations that had rarely entered legal discussions previously. This shift represented not merely a technological adaptation but a profound change in how legal professionals approached their discovery obligations.
During this period, legal teams heavily relied on forensic collection methods and custodial interviews to identify relevant data sources. IT professionals and forensic specialists would often image entire hard drives or server shares, capturing excessive data while potentially missing critical information stored in emerging channels. Collection was typically treated as a discrete event rather than an ongoing process, creating significant challenges when new custodians or data sources were identified midway through litigation. This intersection of traditional legal practice with emerging technology created considerable friction as teams struggled to apply up-till-then conventional discovery principles to increasingly complex digital information environments, often resulting in over-collection, excessive costs, and missed deadlines.
Cloudy Evolution
The next evolutionary stage saw litigation support transformed by sophisticated hosted database platforms and review tools that fundamentally changed how legal teams interacted with electronic evidence. Platforms like Relativity centralized repositories allowing multiple reviewers to simultaneously access documents from any location, dramatically improving collaboration and efficiency. This trend led the shift from on-premise installations requiring substantial hardware investments to cloud-based platforms, such as Nextpoint, offering scalability and reduced capital expenditure, making sophisticated tools accessible to a broader range of legal practices.
All of these logistical and technological evolutions catalyzed a parallel transformation in process management and professional development within the legal profession. Litigation support professionals adopted standardized workflows and project management methodologies with formalized procedures for preservation, collection, processing, and review. Perhaps most significantly, this era marked the emergence of litigation support as a distinct professional discipline rather than simply an administrative function, with specialized certification programs, industry associations, and educational curricula developing to support this growing field. The relationship between attorneys and litigation support professionals evolved from a hierarchical model to a more collaborative partnership, with technology specialists contributing substantial expertise to case planning and discovery strategy. This professionalism reflected the growing recognition that effective information management could significantly impact case outcomes, client satisfaction, and ultimately, the business of law itself.
Platforms like Relativity and Nextpoint didn’t just improve access; they introduced powerful analytics that transformed review itself. Email threading, near duplicate detection, and concept clustering began eliminating redundant work, while Technology Assisted Review (TAR), including Continuous Active Learning (CAL), helped teams prioritize key documents earlier in the process. These innovations increased both speed and defensibility, setting new expectations for how modern review should operate.
Beyond the Horizon
The next frontier in litigation support is the deeper integration of AI, particularly generative AI, into discovery and case analysis. While TAR and CAL have already transformed review workflows, emerging GenAI tools offer potential for privilege assessment, issue tagging, summarization, and even deposition preparation. The challenge is balancing efficiency with caution. The most successful teams will treat AI as augmentation, not automation, preserving human judgment for high-stakes decisions.
This shift is also redefining roles. Litigation support is no longer a back-office function. It’s becoming a strategic hub. Hybrid professionals are emerging, such as data scientists, cybersecurity experts, and legal technologists who span disciplines.
Certifications are expanding beyond eDiscovery into cybersecurity, cloud architecture, and prompt engineering. Legal teams are increasingly integrated with compliance, infosec, and ESG initiatives, making data fluency a core competency. New groups like Legal Data Intelligence (LDI) are forming to address this convergence, while industry powerhouses like ILTA and EDRM are evolving to reflect future-focused workflows.
As technology advances, so does the need for ethical oversight. Explainability, bias, and defensibility are now central to workflow design, not afterthoughts. Litigation support professionals will play a critical role in aligning these tools with legal, ethical, and regulatory standards. In a world driven by algorithms, the human elements such as judgment, accountability, and empathy remain essential.
Conclusion
From copy rooms to cloud platforms, from sticky notes to AI-powered review, litigation support has undergone a profound transformation. What was once a reactive, administrative task is now a strategic function at the intersection of law, technology, and business. As the field continues to evolve, success will belong to those who can adapt quickly, collaborate widely, and lead with both technical insight and ethical clarity.
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