EdiscoveryCanada.com

Reviewers should be aware that e-mail attachments listed in an e-mail message may not appear in the review database in the same order in which they are listed.  Suppose you send an e-mail that includes the following: "please find attached a copy of my resume (resume.doc), a letter of reference (letter.pdf) and a sample of my writing (writing.doc)." The reviewer would expect to find these attachments in the order listed. However, e-mail attachments do not actually have an "order" in the e-mail - they are simply bundled together in the message file. Upon extraction by an e-discovery process, the attachments need to be organized in some form, so typically they would be extracted in alphabetical order. In that case, letter.pdf would be the first record after the message, followed by resume.doc and then writing.doc.