a gigabyte was a large collection. Now moder- ately sized collections may be several terabytes. A few years ago most lawyers could not even spell terabytes.
people’s reading speed does not.
1 2
Assuming that there are about 17,000 documents per gigabyte and that reviewers can manage about 100 documents per hour (your mileage will vary), it would take 170 person hours to read an average gigabyte of ESI. A terabyte would take 170,000 person hours. Com- pare that with the average of 2080 work hours in a year, and you see that a single person work- ing alone, would spend about 81 work years just reading one terabyte of ESI.
At 100 per hour, it would add up to $17 million to review this terabyte, with no raises in sight for those 81 years. That level of effort is simply not sustainable. Clearly something other than putting human eyes on each document is necessary if the justice system is not to collapse.
Technologies are already being employed to reduce this burden, including key word and custodian culling, clustering, and categorization to help eliminate the effort now being expended on nonresponsive documents.
These technologies, as well as the more advanced ones that are coming online all work in concert with human expertise. They free lawyers of some burden but depend on expertise to be used effectively. The coming year will see wider adoption and introduction of new methods to further enhance the efficiency of review.
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Automation will become increas- ingly necessary to deal with ESI. As the volume increases, the resources to deal with those volumes does not. The size of collections go up, but
ESI volumes will continue to
grow. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to predict that the amount of ESI that is being stored continues to grow exponentially. A few years ago,
3 4
5
Unit costs for ESI processing will continue to decrease, but more slowly than volume increases. The cost per gigabyte for ESI processing has been on a downward spiral for many years. But where the volume of
data being processed has exploded thousandfold, the unit prices have decreased by, perhaps, tenfold. Pro- ductivity improvements, deflating hardware costs, and competition have been responsible for the drop in unit pricing, these factors show no sign of abating in the coming year, but the total cost for eDiscovery, includ- ing the cost of review is likely to continue to increase.
Cloud and social media will become more prevalent communications media and their challenge for eDiscovery will increase. Communications have been shifting rapidly over the years from printed memos to emails
and from emails to social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. It is becoming increasingly critical that these social media be included in the discovery process, but it will take further technological development to ad- equately manage this information. According to a sur- vey by Deloitte, a majority of companies say that they are still inadequately prepared to deal with discovery of these media. 2011 will begin to see the introduction and dissemination of tools for managing social com- munications, texting, and the like.
Data archiving, particularly email archiving, will continue to increase in prevalence. The regulatory environment, and, therefore, the need for retention, shows no sign of easing up over the next year or two.
Pricing for has reached a commodity level, and
courts expect a certain degree of competence in deal- ing with preservation and production of emails and other ESI. Intentionally making information difficult to retrieve in the hopes of invoking inaccessibility is generally no longer a viable strategy for avoiding eDis- covery.
These are some of the more significant trends I
see in eDiscovery for the coming year. It seems clear there are technological tools available today, and more on the horizon, that can amplify human intelligence and reduce the burden of eDiscovery.
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