Massive 'Data Spill' in BP Case Could 'Blanket the Gulf of Mexico'

Literally filling warehouses, the paperwork in the Exxon Valdez case was so daunting it prompted hyperbolic comparisons to the 11 million gallons of oil that spewed from the ship itself into Alaska's Prince William Sound. But thanks largely to the 21st-century imperative for parties to hand over all electronic documents that could prove relevant to a matter in litigation, the discovery challenges involved in the BP/Deepwater Horizon case could make even Exxon Valdez look like child's play, writes LeClairRyan attorney William W. Belt, Jr., in the Aug. 18 issue of Westlaw Journal Environmental.

"In the Exxon Valdez case, Shipmaster Joseph Jeffrey Hazelwood never sent a text message about whether, or how much, he had been drinking prior to the disaster. There was no instant-messaging back-and-forth between Exxon executives expressing concern about the ship's sonar navigation system, or e-mail trail related to the overall safety of the iceberg-choked route," writes the veteran attorney, a shareholder in LeClairRyan and leader of the firm's Richmond, Va.-based Discovery Solutions Practice. "The Third Mate in charge of the Exxon Valdez's wheelhouse never 'tweeted' his friends to complain of fatigue and excessive workload. No spill-cam webcast the oil spilling from the tanker."

Indeed, seemingly hyperbolic analogies scarcely do justice to the amount of data that likely will be involved in litigation over the BP/Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill, wrote Belt, who spent long hours sifting through boxes of documents as a young lawyer working on the Exxon Valdez case. If a gigabyte of data amounts to roughly a pickup truck full of books, for example, and a terabyte adds up to 1,000 such pickup trucks, the BP/Deepwater Horizon case--given its complexity, seriousness and the proliferation of electronic files involved--could cross the mind-bending petabyte threshold, Belt says. "Imagine a vast expanse, perhaps somewhere in the Mojave Desert, in which a million pickup trucks full of books cover a parking lot that stretches as far as the eye can see in all directions," he writes. "That would be a petabyte of data."

To Continue Reading: Click Here
---------------------------------------------------------
Source: PR-USA.net