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E-Discovery is Low Tech

By Jerry Bui

A lot of the work we do is low tech in nature. It's funny because the college graduates we hire have been raised in a Web 2.0 world and are shocked to find their time copying & counting files, tying out exceptions, recovering passwords, converting files from one format to another, etc. What's worse is that we'll hire experienced technologists who end up doing similar low grade work. The lucky ones get to run SQL queries. Whoopee! That's considered advanced.

One soon realizes that work in our industry is low tech because it has to be--the volume of data that we process is gargantuan. We have to keep things simple so that we can easily detect mistakes. With all the progress that we've made in document analytics, these advanced techniques tend to fall by the wayside once something faulty is detected in the processing pipeline. Then everyone gets back to basics. Suddenly, our energy is focused on why a piece of meta data is missing; why our file counts are off; why multilingual characters aren't displaying. You only have to experience the tirade of a partner or senior attorney once to realize that data integrity is paramount. Everything else is fluff. Mistakes are bound to happen in our business; whether it's due to a software bug or human error--it doesn't matter. A singular processing mistake can be reason enough to convince a review team to fall back to reviewing everything linearly, one document at a time.

It makes me think of companies that make things like dandruff shampoo. There's very little room for innovation, but they're providing a product for the masses. I'm sure the chemical formula of dandruff shampoo can be pretty complex, but the expectations are simple. Try to invent a cherry flavored version of dandruff shampoo, for example, and you run the risk of introducing a widespread allergic reaction. Do that, and the trust is broken.

Electronic Discovery is a shampoo industry. Meanwhile, the semantic web, social media, spatial GIS and other high tech trends are passing us by. All the while generating more and more data for us to handle and process.

Full post as published by E-Discovery In the Trenches on June 13, 2009 (boomark / email).