I know developers could create an amazing solution, but the legal community hasn't asked yet, unfortunately.
As to the line/page format, it's used because sentences or even words within depositions are quoted in briefs with citations to exactly where they appear. And frankly, if your software can't even grok a simple 2D format it's probably not intelligent enough to do any useful processing of the document.
I'm always on the lookout for good legal technology. But legal technology purveyors are like those people who think programming IDEs should all be visual environments where you program by dragging and dropping connectors between blocks. It's like, no.
You're obligated to provide everything to the other side, doing so in a format that requires them to have a small army of people to read every line instead of being able to do a simple text search is exactly the point. There are even companies that specialize in taking large amounts of electronic data (email is a good example) and printing every single page so that opposing council ends up with enough paper to fill a room.
Edit: I also have no idea how you'd sell a product that considerably reduces billable hours.
Also you can obviously search PDFs. People read every line of deposition transcripts because they're looking for admissions (places where the deponent slips up and reveals useful information).
Often times one litigant can starve the less funded litigant out. Successfully starving a litigant out results in favorable settlements for the offending litigant.
I think you'd want to sell it to the folks who are paying for those billable hours.
Hmm.. perhaps, if they can force the opposition to use similar tech, then they can promise faster resolutions.(That's still assuming both the parties wouldn't mind it much, but don't see it happening).
Surely there's a limit to how awkward you can make this for the other side? Why would the courts allow making it intentionally difficult for one side to gather evidence to help their case?
For example, I'm sure they wouldn't allow you to deliver the documents on numbered post-it notes, one sentence per note and in a random order.
I would have thought the court would insist the material is delivered in the most practical format (e.g. emails as text files or in a searchable database) and both sides get access to the same format unless there are special circumstances.
If delivering documents on posted notes was allowed surely they'd be companies specializing in that.
Oh, it's not sensible but I do appreciate the huge gap between a tossed out "lol, use digital" and reality that people blithely ignore. As a trivial example, marking up emails printed on paper can be a lot easier than doing it digitally.
> Frankly, if someone only has access to paper files they should be required to scan them.
How do you prove the scans are correct? Presumably the paper files have some kind of chain of custody going on - how do you enforce that for digital files? What resolution do you enforce? What colour settings? Or B&W? Or shades of grey, even? What happens to the forensic dots that printers add when you scan a document? They might be vital evidence.
It's fine to just "scan them" in an office but you really want to avoid any kind of potential data loss when you're talking about evidence in a court case.
And dipping into the wilder reaches of fantasy, how do you guard against things like steganography being used to pass information secretly? Or avoid viruses / trojans / zipbombs / whatnots?
Once ingested, the documents are searched for words or phrases, tagged as relevant, privileged, or non-responsive. See the FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) for discussion of electronic documents in discovery.
Not only are courts expecting parties in lawsuits to supply documents in electronic form, there are are now rules in some courts tailored to TAR, or technical assisted review, which often means LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis).
So the idea of dropping tons of paper on the hapless opponent is an idea that is practically of antiquity, dating back to the MCI/ATT lawsuits. Large lawsuits simply don't work that way anymore.
There also would be a time-synchronized video and an e-transcript, yes, in proprietary non-open standards.