Legal coding is the process of creating summary or keyword data from a document. It is widely used in the

legal profession Legal profession is a profession in which legal professionals study, develop and apply law. Usually, there is a requirement for someone choosing a career in law to first pass a bar examination after obtaining a law degree or some other form of l ...

to create a fast-search index or

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...

of documents for use in

litigation A lawsuit is a proceeding by one or more parties (the plaintiff or claimant) against one or more parties (the defendant) in a civil court of law. The archaic term "suit in law" is found in only a small number of laws still in effect today. ...

. 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. * 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 Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

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 according to 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.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Legal Coding Legal citation Document management systems