How to Manage ESI to Rein In Runaway Costs

The swelling cost of electronic discovery is a pressing issue for businesses everywhere, and many GCs are now resigned to spending ever-larger shares of their companies' budgets on managing and producing massive amounts of electronically stored information. Yet, even amid the rolling waves of e-mails, text messages, spreadsheets, and other digital documents that wash into and out of just about any company during the average workday, proper management of ESI need not translate into a budget-busting nightmare. Indeed, by taking an informed and systematic approach to the problem, many businesses stand to dramatically lower their e-discovery costs.

For most companies, the biggest expense in this area comes in the form of billable hours for document-review attorneys. These teams of specialists are tasked with sifting through digital files for information that could be relevant to ongoing legal matters. Sometimes, the reviews center on oceans of ones and zeros -- volumes of data so vast they are measured in terabytes. (One terabyte equals 1,000 gigabytes, or a trillion bytes.) Naturally, an overarching goal of any e-discovery cost-reduction effort should be to figure out how to tighten this review process. Is it possible for attorneys to be given fewer documents to review from the outset? Are there ways in which the review process itself could be sped up without sacrificing accuracy?

A logical place to start is the data in hand -- all of the information stored on servers, hard drives, back-up tapes, and the like in systems old and new. Despite the high cost of its painstaking preservation and storage, much of this data will never be relevant to any legal case. (Think of those ubiquitous e-mails with the likes of "Happy Birthday, Jan!" or "Super-cute YouTube baby!" in the subject line.) Indeed, according to a 2009 survey by Framingham, Mass.-based IDC, 60 to 80 percent of the information retained by corporations in America has no value from a business or legal perspective.

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Source: law.com
By: Dennis R. Kiker