About

The Advanced Microsystems Advantage

Chuck Frakes, Founder of Advanced Microsystems, has been in Litigation Support since 1979. He began working as a process server and advanced to become office manager of another service bureau. During his 7-year tenure, he was responsible for managing multiple high profile cases.

Advanced Microsystems was formed in 1986 by Chuck Frakes, and continues the pursuit of bringing technology to the legal industry.

High-Profile Cases for Which We Provided Litigation Support

1. Asbestos Claim Management (1984-1990) involving Owens Corning Fiberglass and the lining of Asbestos as a fire retardant in Navy Ships during World War II. The Asbestos Claims Management, aka Mesothelioma, was one of the largest lawsuits in American history and through the discovery subpoena process, produced millions of pages of records that were captured using the microfilming process. Chuck was responsible for client interface, management of multiple field technicians to ensure accuracy, and developed a method to organize the process of microfilming records.
2. Pacific Gas & Electric Company (1993-1996), the case that the movie Erin Brokovich was based on. Chuck was responsible for managing the microfilming and organization of several million pages of records for the plaintiff which helped secure a settlement of over $333 million dollars for the plaintiffs damaged by groundwater contamination.

Our company has a very low turnover rate. Most of our employees have been with the company over 13 years. We understand the needs of our clients and will bend over backwards to ensure the job is performed correctly to the client’s order. Advanced Microsystems has built a stellar relationship with our client base. Most of which have been with our organization for 15 plus years.

Advanced Microsystems was one of the first service bureaus in Los Angeles to embrace eDiscovery in the early 2000’s. eDiscovery (Artificial Intelligence) is short for electronic discovery, and defined as the process of discovery in civil litigation that is carried out in electronic formats. It encompasses what most often is referred to as electronically stored information, or ESI.

Examples of the types of ESI included are emails, instant messaging chats, documents, accounting databases, CAD/CAM files, websites, and any other electronic information that could be relevant evidence in a lawsuit. Included in eDiscovery are “raw data” and “metadata,” which forensic investigators can review for hidden evidence.

The eDiscovery Process

As a practice, the eDiscovery process runs from the time a lawsuit is foreseeable to the time the digital evidence is presented in court. At a high level, the process is as follows:

1. Data is identified as relevant by attorneys and placed on legal hold.
2. Attorneys from both sides determine scope of discovery, identify the relevant ESI, and make eDiscovery requests and challenges. Search parameters can be negotiated with an opposing counsel or auditor to identify what is being searched and to ensure needed evidence is identified and non-evidence is screened out, thereby reducing the overall effort required to search, review, and produce it.
3. Evidence is then extracted and analyzed using digital forensic procedures, and is usually converted into PDF or TIFF form for use in court. It often can be advantageous to use pattern and trend identification and other analytical search techniques here so these tasks can be performed more efficiently and make less use of expensive human resources.