In Legal Disputes, Make the Most of Your Own ‘Big Data’

So called “structured data” is highly organized in-house data that is stored in fields in an exacting way by software, in contrast to email and correspondence, which is known as unstructured data. Many in the business, including many lawyers, don’t know it exists and may assume they have no reason to know – until the appearance of some unique dispute where it can help build a case. It takes a “data dictionary” to understand what kind of structured data exists and where it’s located. Lawyers, writes Larry Kanter of Kanter Financial Forensics LLC,  need to make sure that the company IT department maintains an up-to-date data dictionary and understands how important it is to make the legal team aware of absolutely every kind of data that has been collected.