May 21 2008
Is This Normal?
I have a case in which opposing counsel is sending me approximately 1,000 pages of nonconfidential pages of discovery. He asked if he could send them to me electronically (note, these are from a third party and, for a variety of reasons, edicsovery is not a concern). He currently has the files in PDF and he asked his assistant to email them to me.
Not surprisingly, somewhere along the way, something ate the PDF attachment. I talked with him yesterday and asked him to burn a CD for me and I would have someone pick it up. His response was that he would have his assistant put in a request to create the CD, but he could not promise when it would be completed because his assistant had to follow the proper channels.
Is this normal? I am unusual in having simply grabbed a blank CD yesterday and burned some documents to it before mailing it off (ironically enough, to the same attorney).
I guess that I am just curious about how most firms typically do these types of things. Please note that opposing counsel does not work for a large firm.
Can this kind of thing be handled by a YouSendIt or Drop.Io kind of functionality?
I would (and have [http://shrinkify.com/75j]) used YouSendIt for this type of thing. I didn’t want to try to explain it to the process to the other attorney.
Are you sure OP has an actual assistant? Perhaps OP has a virtual assistant and he didn’t want to say, “It’s going to take me a while to get to that because I don’t have an actual assistant.” Just a thought. I agree… it seems pretty easy to just burn a CD.
Good thought Mike. But he does have an assistant on premises. I have met her before. There are several attorneys and employees in his office.
I received my CD. The zipped file size was 102 MB. Who thinks you can email a file of that size?
Ha!”It mustgo through channels.” I must remember this excuse when a lawyer gives me an assignment of which I don’t want to outright refuse to accept.”Your request of assignment is being process through proper channels.”
Actually, you won’t be surprised, but we do have a channel we have to follow in our office to burn a cd. I have to put the stuff in a shared folder, send an email making the request, and a graphic arts guy actually has to do it. Wonder how often I get in trouble for not following that one?
Tell him to use ConXPoint to store and share his files. I read your blog almost daily and couldn’t resist the plug.
This is exactly the situation in which a SaaS product can eliminate this problem (reply pending on your latest post.) Our service in particular is GLB compliant and doesn’t require attachments or mailing to deliver files. YouSendIt is also another great alternative. I’m downloading a 49 MB file as I type this message from yousendit.