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: E-Discovery In the Trenches

Trend towards the Proactive

By Jerry Bui

Many in our industry have predicted a trend towards more proactive e-discovery solutions, and I tend to agree. In its most simplest form, this argument means reducing the volume of data and overall costs. Whether this is accomplished through "early case analysis" or better software, the distinguishing feature is where & when one decides to pare the corpus of data for a particular matter. If you identify the priority custodians and send all of their material en masse to a vendor, you are taking the traditional route and being reactive. If however, you can pare the material by priority custodian, date range, and keywords onsite, behind the firewall at the corporation you are definitely being more proactive than most. Now, we all know keywords have limited effectiveness for identifying relevant material, but that's a topic for a whole other discussion. The point is, keyword search terms are still very commonly utilized in litigation matters and if you can filter the data ahead of time and send only the resultant material to your vendor, it will reduce your overall cost significantly.

Most attorneys will argue that it is within the client's interest to keep all the data in one location--typically at the technology vendor's data center; so in the event that keyword search terms change (which they will) or the priority custodian list changes (which it will), it will save time to make these changes on-the-fly in one unified location rather than in a piecemeal fashion, once at the corporation and once again at the vendor after more data has been shipped.

For my next blog entry, I will talk about the latest school of thought: let's keep all the data at the corporation and NEVER send it to a technology vendor!!

Full post as published by E-Discovery In the Trenches on April 15, 2008 (boomark / email).