Summation as Research Database
I had an interesting conversation with an attorney today, who is doing something rather interesting with our document review tool, Summation. He’s gotten so used to reviewing documents in it, and searching in it, and come to rely on the OCR search especially, that he’s pulled together a bunch of random emails, articles, white papers, etc. that he’s always wanting to keep around to refer to as part of his practice, and is having us put them into Summation.
Once there, he goes in and codes a little summary, and maybe an “issue” to make a keyword, and can search there, instead of leaving through a box of stuff he printed off to keep around.
Now, granted, he needs me to put the data into Summation, but that’s not very much work, and frankly, anything I can do to encourage our attorneys to use Summation is a good thing in my book!
I’m wondering if that might not be a bad way to handle electronic discovery research as well, though I do have many of the same features in Evernote in terms of search, but I wonder just how many documents I can cram into Evernote before it is too much, especially compared to something like Summation.
I feel like a test may be coming, if I can find some free time!
What do you think? Do you have folks using something like Summation for research data? Let me know!


