Disorganized medical records in litigation — is this just the norm now?

I’m interested in hearing perspectives from people who deal with medical records in litigation.

In many files I’ve encountered, the biggest challenge isn’t medical interpretation — it’s simply reconstructing what happened from the records themselves:

• Thousands of pages scanned out of order, often with heavy duplication
• Missing or incomplete documentation (e.g., night-shift notes, pathology, consults)
• Information spread across different sections or systems (labs, meds, imaging, notes)
• Copy-forward documentation that obscures clinical changes
• Vague charting that’s hard to translate into a clear factual timeline
• Hybrid records with handwritten notes, poor scans, or unreliable OCR

Before any expert opinion or legal analysis, a surprising amount of effort goes into just establishing a clean chronology and identifying gaps.

Curious whether others see this as an unavoidable reality of modern records, or whether expectations have shifted over time.