Ubiquitous Databases

Why we tend to ignore databases and how they can help us find key evidence.

Databases touch our lives every day. Our computers, phones and e-mail are databases. Google, Westlaw, Craigslist, Amazon, E-Bay, Facebook: all big databases.

We can't web surf, make a phone call, use an ATM, charge a meal, buy groceries, get a driver's license or book or board a flight unless a database makes it happen.

Databases run the world. Yet, when it comes to e-discovery, we tend to fix our attention on documents, without appreciating that what "feel" like documents exist only as a flash mob of information assembled and organized on the fly from dozens, thousands, or millions of sources drawn from multiple fast-changing systems, locations, and formats. In our zeal for documents over data, we make discovery harder, slower, and costlier. Understanding databases and acquiring the skill to peruse and use their contents gets us to the evidence better, faster, and cheaper.

Databases demand that we re-examine our thinking about discovery. Historically, parties weren't obliged to create documents for production. They produced what they had. Today, documents don't exist until generated.

Tickets, bank statements, websites, price lists, phone records, and register receipts are all just ad hoc database reports. Only one-tenth of one percent of documents exist as ink on paper, obliging litigants to become adept at crafting queries to elicit responsive data and master ways to interpret and use that data.

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Source: law.com
By: Craig Ball