The Information Explosion and a Great Article by Grossman and Cormack on Legal Search

We live in a world of explosions, from nuclear bombs to improvised explosive devices (IED). The IEDs at the side of the road are less dramatic and sophisticated than nuclear weapons, but deadly just the same. In 2009, there were 7,228 IED attacks in Afghanistan alone. By 2010 IED attacks in Afghanistan had killed 268 U.S. soldiers and wounded 3,366. On this Memorial Day 2011, we salute our military who face them bravely and pay tribute to those who gave their lives in service. The IED explosions are, thankfully, remote for most of us.

But one explosion, an abstraction really, and seemingly harmless by comparison, is felt by everyone everyday, the Information Explosion. The impact of this explosion on the law has not been good. Yet the article by Maura R. Grossman and Gordon V. Cormack discussed in this blog gives us reason to hope that the legal profession may yet survive the blast. Technology-Assisted Review in E-Discovery Can Be More Effective and More Efficient Than Exhaustive Manual Review, Richmond Journal of Law and Technology, Vol. XVII, Issue 3, Article 11 (2011).

Information Explosion

Wikipedia defines explosion as a rapid increase in volume and release of energy in an extreme manner. The volume of information in the world, especially the volume of electronically stored information (ESI) on our computers, has rapidly increased. Of that, there can be no doubt. See eg. my video with Jason R. Baron: e-Discovery: Did you Know?, or see Cisco’s article, The Explosion of Data, which claims that every five minutes, we create an explosion of digital data equivalent to all of the information stored in the Library of Congress. Or listen to Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, who claims that we now create as much information in two days as we did from the dawn of man through 2003.

But what of the rapid increase in release of energy in an extreme manner characteristic of an explosion? That is the bad, damaging part of explosions, where the release of too much energy too fast creates a fireball of destruction. With IEDs, the harm is obvious. The explosions cause indiscriminate death and injury. But what harm does an information explosion cause? What harm is there in the release of too much information, too fast? What is the harm of information overload?

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Source: www.e-discoveryteam.com
By: Ralph Losey