Litigation document management

• US 20090150168A1
• Filed: 12/07/2007
• Published: 06/11/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 12/07/2007
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: SAP SE
• Original Assignee: SAP AG (SAP SE)
• Inventors: Schmidt, Olaf
• Application Number:
  US12/001,048
• Publication Number:
  US 20090150168A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 705/311
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/10 Office automation; Time management
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 50/18 Legal services

Abstract

Software for litigation document management is communicably coupled with a rules repository. The example software is operable to identify a litigation matter. The software can then execute an electronic discovery process across a plurality of object types for the identified litigation matter to identify relevant objects using the rules repository, where the electronic discovery process operable to automatically discover relationships among a plurality of the relevant objects perhaps in response to user input. The software is further operable to place a legal hold on at least a first of the relevant objects. The software can then visualize information for at least a portion of the relevant objects.

Claims

1. Software for litigation document management, the software comprising computer readable instructions embodied on tangible media, communicably coupled with a rules repository, and operable to:

identify a litigation matter;

execute an electronic discovery process across a plurality of object types for the identified litigation matter to identify relevant objects using the rules repository, the electronic discovery process operable to automatically discover relationships among a plurality of the relevant objects;

place a legal hold on at least a first of the relevant objects; and

visualize information for at least a portion of the relevant objects.

2. The software of claim 1, the relevant objects associated with a plurality of system architectures, at least one of the architectures comprising a remote system architecture.

3. The software of claim 1 further operable to store information associated with at least a portion of the relevant objects in a lookup table.

4. The software of claim 3, the stored information comprising information for parent objects and the lookup table referencing the relationships.

5. The software of claim 3 further operable to offer an application programming interface (API) to remote applications for access to the lookup table.

6. The software of claim 1, the litigation matter identified through a user interface and associated with a case type and a unique identifier.

7. The software of claim 6, the electronic discovery process using rules associated with the case type from the rules repository.

8. The software of claim 1, the object types comprising at least a subset of business object, archive data, document, e-mail, and source code.

9. The software of claim 1, the visualized information presented through an interface and filtered based on a personalization rule.

10. The software of claim 1, the visualized information comprising a tree view of at least one of the relationships.

11. The software of claim 1, the software comprising an electronic discovery framework communicably coupled with the rules repository, a legal hold framework communicably coupled with the lookup table, and a front-end for visualizing the information.

12. The software of claim 11, the electronic discovery framework comprising an archive module, a source code module, a business object module, and an e-mail module.

13. The software of claim 11, each framework associated with a plurality of application programming interfaces (APIs) exposed for use by a plurality of applications.