Globalization has turned the old adage "act local, think global" into a new one: "act local, act global." The new adage was apparent at LegalTech where vendors recognized the importance of supporting multiple languages in litigation. For example, Kroll Ontrack, a provider of paper and electronic discovery, computer forensics, and litigation readiness and response services, announced that their e-discovery software has multilingual support for cross-border litigation and investigations for lawyers representing clients in the Asia Pacific region.
E-discovery in the U.S. is local, but it can be global as well. Because documents in any country and in any language can be the subject of U.S. litigation. For example, a product designed in Singapore is manufactured in China, assembled in Korea, and distributed in the U.S. where it becomes the subject of litigation, viz., product liability. In which case, the product's design, manufacture, and assembly may be relevant topics for e-discovery. If that's the case, you may have multiple, foreign custodians and documents in multiple languages not all of them Unicode compliant. What to do?
At the least, you will want a capture and review program that supports the languages of litigation. You can focus on Unicode, but the standard has not been practiced long. Most likely, you will have documents using code pages from Microsoft Windows or IBM for Chinese and Korean character sets. So you will need something that is not only Unicode-compliant, but also backwards compatible with older code pages that will allow you to capture and review relevant data sets in e-discovery.
Kroll Ontrack software, including their processing and review tool Inview, appears ready for the above global e-discover sceneario with:
- The ability to process Unicode documents in a variety of languages.
- Full multilingual search support in Inview, including proximity and Boolean searching of Western European and East Asian data, to help legal teams pinpoint documents that are important to the case and exclude privileged material.
- Documents, regardless of source language, can be centralized, supported and reviewed in Inview.
- Output features that produce multilingual documents in a variety of formats, including full OCR support for redacted documents in their original language.
The next step for vendors in the "act local, act global" framework will be to support multiple languages in litigation preparedness tactics such as creating and maintaining policies on documents in multiple languages and providing multilingual litigation hold services.
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