Once your documents have been imaged, a database of summaries/abstracts can be created on a local or network PC. Combined with OCR (optical character recognition), this allows for full text search and retrieval. Within the database each record corresponds to a single document, and contains a number of fields identifying objective information (i.e., Bates numbers, Document Date, Document Type, Title, Authors, Recipients, CCs, BCCs, etc.) and subjective information (i.e., Issues, Summaries, Comments, etc.).

Once a document database is constructed, the user has the ability to search the entire database, or perform field-specific searches (e.g., in preparation for the John Wilson deposition you can search the AUTHOR field of all records containing the words "John Wilson", "Wilson, John", "J. Wilson", etc.) The results will identify all documents authored by the deponent. Using a database to locate all the John Wilson documents will cut your deposition preparation time by as much as fifty percent (50%). By deploying the power of a litigation support database, you'll be able to find "HOT DOCS" that may otherwise have been overlooked. The ability to locate relevant documents once took minutes or hours , now it can be done in seconds.