Eli5, how do complex court cases keep track of all the documents?

Question

I can’t find an email from last week. How does a special council ingest, sort millions of documents from hundreds of disparate sources and then find it later? Then how do they present it to make a simple story? Especially if it’s millions of documents they have to keep track of.

In: 9

Answer 1

I think that depends on juridiction, but here I know all the papers the police makes (and gives to lawyers) are numbered, and in large cases they make an index. Something like:

doc 01 emergency call

doc 02 first interview with accused (as a witness)

doc 02.01 second interview with accused

doc 03 bank statement

…

In simmilar cases the structure is the same.