Coding can be a useful activity when you are faced with a rapidly growing number of documents in the course of the Discovery Process and the accessibility of the information contained in these documents becomes an area of concern. The larger the document population the more difficult it will be to manage the documents and to gain access to the needed information within a reasonable period of time. Coding will prove to be particularly useful in preparing for trial or settlement when you can't afford to lose any time on searching endlessly through perhaps hundreds of thousands of pages for the documents you need.
In almost every discovery that we carry out in Europe, we find that a substantial percentage of the document collection is written in a language other than English, mainly in German, French and Dutch. In our experience, the average percentage of non-English documents varies between 40 and 60 percent of the total document collection. Obviously, this affects the accessibility of the information contained in the documents, since the majority of American lawyers have insufficient knowledge of languages such as German, French and Dutch.
One way of working around this problem is to code the documents making sure that all key information is translated into English during the Coding process. Especially in larger projects, this requires selecting, hiring, training and managing additional coding personnel who have a good command of preferably all languages found in the documents. However difficult this may seem, it is our experience that many of the younger Europeans have sufficient mastery of at least two or three European languages besides their native language.