Taming The Litigation Beast: Are You Ready?

Document discovery has historically been a paper-based process. Plaintiff’s counsel requests documents, and defense counsel searches and sifts through desk drawers and file cabinets to locate, review and produce copies of responsive information.

For more complex cases, defense teams often use scanning and coding services to transform the paper documents into electronic documents in order to more efficiently review and manage the information and discovery response process.

Today, however, more and more of these documents are created and stored electronically. The ease and low cost of creating and storing these documents have changed the rules of the game dramatically. Recent studies show that more than 90% of all new corporate data is created and stored electronically, and most of this data never sees the paper format.

The proliferation of computers and low cost of storage has resulted in an information explosion, and the amount of potentially relevant data now involved in most every type of lawsuit has grown exponentially.

The Paper Chase

In the past, complex cases may have involved hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that needed to be identified, collected, reviewed and produced. Today, even simple cases may involve that many documents, and complex cases now regularly involve hundreds of millions of pages of documents, or the equivalent of several semi trucks full of bankers’ boxes.

Even the lexicon of describing the volume of data is changing from the paper-based ‘number of pages’ to the digital nomenclature of ‘megabytes, gigabytes and terabytes’ of data. To make matters worse, these electronic documents are located all over the corporate computer network from email servers to file servers to laptops to personal digital assistants (PDAs) to back up tapes and zip disks. Even recordings and stored data from cell phones and voicemail systems are becoming part of the pool of potentially responsive data.

The sheer enormity and complexity of the transformation in discovery response practice can be overwhelming to a defendant faced with a discovery request. Where is all the data stored? How do I locate it? How do I access and extract it off the network? Etc., etc.