4 Ways to Elevate Your Evidence Management – But Not Your Workload

If you’ve ever worked on litigation, you’re likely familiar with the grueling challenges that accompany deposition preparation, motion practice, or trial. Filtering through the enormous, often unorganized stack of notes from across your case team in the hopes of finding the best pieces of evidence, then correctly formatting everything before the next day’s deadline is daunting – and tedious. 

There needs to be a faster, more comprehensive way for case teams to collect and assess facts and evidence to develop the strongest possible case strategy – a way that actually leaves time for strategizing, not hunt-and-peck (or worse, try-to-remember).

Fortunately, your case team can streamline workloads by building a well-organized evidence management system using Case Builder. Specifically, Case Builder’s Annotations page provides key workflows to help you work more efficiently and get more time to develop a winning case strategy. 

The Annotations page provides a holistic view of all of your team’s annotations from across all depositions on a single page. Here, you can search, edit, review, and export any or all of the excerpts you or your colleagues tagged or added a note to – without going into each deposition or referencing that Word document you keep open to track important testimony.

With automation in mind, we designed the Annotations page to automatically populate all the annotations you make on deposition transcripts within Case Builder. You will immediately see the benefit throughout four key stages of your litigation: 

Motion practice

Whether you’re preparing a discovery motion challenging a failure to answer questions at a deposition or a motion to exclude witness testimony, you can more readily access and compare what witnesses have said about an issue and how their respective credibility would support your argument using the Annotations page.

Trying to find just the right fact for inclusion in your motion for summary judgment? Pinpointing the most important witness testimony to reinforce an argument now takes less than a second. You can even copy/paste into your motion right from the Annotations page instead of going into the deposition itself (Bluebook formatting and citation automatically applied, of course).

Settlement discussions and mediation

Have you ever prioritized reading or answering emails based on what you can see in the excerpt view of each in your inbox? Putting together a formidable mediation statement or identifying a trend in your evidence to manage client expectations at a settlement conference no longer requires application-switching or hair-pulling. The Annotations page allows you to see at a glance which excerpts of testimony you may wish to use – or not.

Deposition preparation

If you have your contract dispute hat on, you can use the Annotations page to compare key testimony on the parties’ understanding of offer, acceptance, terms, or performance, and figure out your line of questioning in just a few clicks. Similarly, you can prep your expert witness for deposition by pulling key testimony from relevant transcripts to review with them.

Related: DISCO Introduces Cecilia Deposition Summaries, Powered by Generative AI 🤖

Trial preparation

Back when you were prepping for the bar exam, it was probably easier for you to see themes in subjects when looking at an outline versus re-reading the textbook. The same principle applies to recognizing and capitalizing on themes in your case using Case Builder: With the Annotations page, you can identify and understand key narratives and themes from across all of your depositions and witnesses even more readily via a single, centralized view. You can even compare video evidence across witnesses from that same view to ensure you’re showing only the best evidence in court.

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The Annotations page is just one of the ways that Case Builder makes depositions easier for legal professionals to navigate. Learn what else Case Builder can do, or get a personalized demo to see it for yourself.