Legal coding

Legal coding is the process of creating summary or keyword data from a document. It is widely used in the legal profession to create a fast-search index or database of documents for use in litigation.

Objective Coding Definitions • The recording of basic data such as date, author, or document type, from documents into a database. • Extracting information from electronic documents such as date created, author recipient, CC and linking each image to the information in pre-defined objective fields. In direct opposition to Subjective coding where legal interpretations of data in a document are linked to individual documents. Also called bibliographic coding. • Also called bibliographic coding. Extracting such information from a document as its author, its mailing date, etc. Objective coding is usually done from the document text or image, because the metadata may be inaccurate. For example, a document written and signed by a partner might show the administrative assistant as the author in the metadata, because it was originally typed on the assistant’s computer.

Subjective coding

Subjective coding is the indexing of documents around subjective data. This may be gleaned from templates, or more usually from a subjective reading by someone familiar with the topic. This is the more reliable way to determine factors such as 'importance' of the document.

Document Coder

Document Coders play a valuable role in large-scale litigation and high-volume document productions. Document coding (also called objective coding, legal coding or litigation coding) is a form of data entry in which coders review batches of legal documents to capture specific, predefined metadata such as document type, date, author, bates number, etc. Document coders enter that data into a searchable database that allows documents – which may number in the millions - to be easily sorted and retrieved during the course of litigation.