When attorney Chris J. Bristow walked into a bankruptcy trustee’s storage unit in April, he expected to be done and on his way in a few hours.

Three days later, he was still there, riffling through about 35 floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets and about 100 banker’s boxes during formal discovery in a high-stakes corporate spat that threatened his client, Fort Lauderdale-based Becker & Poliakoff, with a $160 million malpractice lawsuit.