While many people know Complete Legal for our ESI consulting, eDiscovery and trial graphics services, there is another important part of our business: traditional services.

Traditional services include printing and scanning, things that are imperative to most law firms, but often aren’t in the limelight with today’s focus on technology. Just as we can no longer litigate cases without taking emails and other electronically stored information into account, we can’t collect emails and the like without incorporating the paper that no longer or never existed electronically either. By providing both services, at the highest levels available in house, Complete Legal clients enjoy continuity that helps streamline the discovery process.

Aside from that, clients come to us for all types of other litigation support projects:

• Help organizing and scanning messy boxes of random papers
• Extra care with confidential documents that need a Chain of Custody – a defensible, legally binding contract that tracks the document from the time it leaves their hands until the time it is returned
• Large scale printing projects
• Producing, tabbing and organizing exhibit binders for trial or deposition preparation
• Digitizing paper documents received in discovery
• Printing and binding hard copy briefs to file with the court
• Internal investigation matters that require the utmost in confidentiality
• Demonstrative design and execution
• Printing large format graphics and photos

Andrea White, Operations Manager, started at Complete Legal in 2016 and runs our traditional services department, managing a team of dedicated document specialists. With nearly 15 years of experience in the industry, she knows how to get the job done and keep clients happy, not always an easy task considering how quickly projects need to be turned around and how different paralegal and attorney expectations can be.

“Everyone organizes differently,” Andrea shared. “What makes sense to you or me might not make sense to our client, so it’s our job to figure out how their brain works and deliver on that. Beyond that, we have to think quickly. About half of our jobs need to be turned around within 24-48 hours.”

That’s what makes the job interesting, Andrea explains. “When I get to work, I immediately write a list of what I need to accomplish today because I know within 30 minutes I’ll be pulled in many different directions. But I love that, I love the challenge of not knowing what’s coming in for the day and I love working with clients, letting them know ‘we got this’ and having the confidence in my team to know we will deliver.”

While it’s easy to assume traditional services are cut and dry, having a litigation support company handling these logistics makes a big difference.

“We are different from a lot of other providers, especially from a traditional printing company where you drop off the job and pick it up later, while it sits there next to a lawn company banner and a child’s birthday party invites. We use a legal-specific software that is very organized and very efficient for this industry and our office is secure both physically and virtually to protect the confidential nature of the documents we are regularly entrusted with.”

Efficiency is key, especially at the scale many of our law firm clients are operating.

“We are printing and scanning frequently and have the ability to handle extremely large amounts of paper,” Andrea explained. “For example, we’re currently working on a request that consists of 40,000 pages of trial exhibits. Our client needs four sets for trial, so we’re printing and foldering 160,000 pages of exhibits – that’s more than 54 boxes of documents.”

The good news: we are prepared for that.

“We have scheduled staff in our facility for 15 hours every business day and a system and schedule to flex that up to 24 hours when workload dictates,” Andrea explained. “We also have people that work through weekends to get things done. Especially when we have clients preparing for a trial, it’s all hands-on deck to help get them ready. We often have needs to run our operations 24/7 and have proven that we can execute on that regularly. I’m not aware of another facility in the region that can say that.”

Beyond our team’s experience (over 75 years of traditional services experience alone), much of our success can be attributed to our 2-step quality control process which ensures that every document, whether it’s copied, scanned or printed, has undergone a page-by-page manual review. This page-for-page QC process is always done by a different person than the one who scanned it, lowering the likelihood of a misunderstood instruction making it back to a client. A final QC process is performed by a manager before the project is returned to the client. This final QC step is our way of ensuring that we apply a “common sense” check to each project we handle.

Andrea works closely with Ryan Bauer, Senior Account Manager, who sits down with clients, discovering their goals and working together to figure out what the project looks like. He makes recommendations based on his nearly 15 years of experience in the industry.

“We are transparent and constantly communicating with our clients, letting them know what we learn. We tell them when we run into a complexity, whether something is more pages than they thought it would be, or the cost could exceed their original expectations. If it gets to a certain point, we advise them to connect with our eDiscovery group and host a database to review the documents if that would potentially be a more efficient approach.”

“That’s what makes Complete Legal and our litigation support services so special,” Ryan went on. “We have all of these services and all of these experts under our roof and we can help clients determine the best game plan to give them a competitive advantage with their case. A lot of clients use us for ESI consulting, eDiscovery or trial services, but we make the biggest impact when we’re involved in the entire case – from start to finish.”

You Focus on Winning, We’ll Handle the Logistics