I had some discovery that I had to deliver to an opposing attorney. It was a construction case. This meant that almost all of the original documents actually existed as handwriting on paper. The remaining documents were letters and other similar documents. Thus providing evidence that not all cases are headed down the electronic discovery path.
As is my standard practice, I had all of the documents scanned so that I could Bates Stamp them and work with them electronically. Knowing that I needed to deliver these documents to opposing counsel, I was faced with three options.
- I could print the 800 pages and have them physically delivered to the attorney–thereby incurring both costs of printing and costs of delivery; or
- I could burn a copy of the documents to a CD and mail that to the attorney–thereby incurring costs of delivery (admittedly only $0.41); or
- I could electronically transfer the documents electronically–thereby incurring no costs.
I chose option 3. I used a service called YouSendIt. YouSendIt uploads a copy of your document to their server and sends an email to your designated recipient with a link where they can download the file you uploaded.
As long as the file is less than 100MB, the service is free. With the free service, the link is good for seven days. If you want to deal with larger files, you can also sign up for paid accounts. The paid accounts also give you the ability to control the maximum number of downloads for a file, give you file tracking, and give you the ability to password protect the file.
The one thing I would caution about the free service is that the file is not encrypted. Thus, you would not want to send confidential information through the free service. In my case, the documents that I was sending contained no such information.
The best part of the service was the call I received from opposing counsel, who absolutely loved the way that I delivered the documents. He inquired about how the service worked and was interested in trying it out as method of sending the same documents to his client.
As I noted above, this service should not be used with all types of communications or documents. However, if you have a big file that you need to send to someone, YouSendIt is a great, free option that allows you to transfer files virtually instantaneously.
YouSendIt is just another example of how we can leverage technology to make our lives easier (as well as to save us some overhead costs).
I’ve been trying to get my lawyers to let me use something like this for non-confidential documents we circulate to clients. I’m continually hitting the brick wall of a client’s e-mail server file-size limitations. I’m always dividing PDFs into multiple files to get them through. Once I even had to divide a single PDF into more than 20 parts! The thing is, when I suggested this to my lawyers, they were like, “what??” They’d never heard of it and had no idea what I was talking about. But then, you’d think a firm the size of mine would have its own FTP server for just this kind of thing. We don’t. Very frustrating.
These links you come up with are great.
Thank you!!
Hi Bryan,
Sending large files is a pain, isn’t it!? Have you tried 2Large2Email? It’s clean, simple and easy to use. It’s gaining popularity quickly.
Also, as a lawyer, you might be interested in this, taken right off the YSI license agreement. Not so good:
Ownership of User Files
YouSendIt does not claim any ownership rights in any User Files that you make available through the Service. However, by making User Files available through the Service, you hereby grant to YouSendIt a nonexclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable, worldwide license to use, copy, distribute and process User Files on the Sites and through the Service.