by Dara Scott, Client Delivery Manager, Fios, Inc.
Gaining control of the costs associated with review of ESI is critical. There’s no question the biggest cost in the process is attorney document review time; according to a case study performed by a leading legal staffing company, the average monthly bill rate for a class action lawsuit with 5.6 million documents and 100 contract review attorneys is $1.54M! For this reason, taking steps to reduce that cost prior to and during the review process can dramatically reduce the total cost of e-discovery.
Discovery does not begin with document review, whether paper or electronic. It starts with collecting relevant documents, in this case electronically stored information. Limiting the number of documents begins at the collection process, with the initial goal being to limit the scope of collection while maintaining defensibility. This is commonly referred to as a targeted collection.
Technology and a well-defined ESI content map that identifies custodians and the location of their data can effectively assist your team with performing a targeted collection. Technology tools that use keyword and concept searching, de-duplication and other filtering methods can also shrink the amount of data in the ultimate review set. In a recent legal matter involving a Fortune 500 company, the project manager for the organization elected not to employ de-duplication because there was a need to process large volumes of data in a compressed timeframe. As it turned out, the short-term time and cost savings were completely negated when the post-project assessment revealed that 54% of the data reviewed could have been eliminated using standard de-duplication procedures. That is why it is critically important to have a measured, repeatable approach to handling ESI, so that greater efficiencies are generated at every stage of the review process.
Filed under Discerning e-Discovery.
May 19th, 2009 at 8:05 am
I have fondly referred to the targeted collection process as “e-scoping” for many years. You can listen to my recent podcast discussing the topic at http://www.esibytes.com/?cat=58.