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This show might be more accurately described as how not to shop for electronic discovery services. Listen to Brett Burney, a leading electronic discovery and legal IT consultant, provide a framework for this important issue which law firms and company’s both face. What should you look for? When is price the most important issue? How do you perform a reference check? When can comparing price can turn into an apples and oranges comparison? These and other issues will be discussed.
In case you are interested, JurInnov offers a free electronic discovery calculator which calculates the cost, data sizes, and return on investment (ROI) for a variety of electronic discovery project scenarios.
Recorded 08/24/2009
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Nice discussion of the processes and services responsible for the costs of ediscovery.
The lowest-hanging fruit in reducing the cost of discovery is: 1. limiting the amount to be reviewed, and 2. limiting the cost of review. The amount to review is a function of both the amount stored and the breadth of the request that survives challenge (or is ultimately agreed upon). Once a document request is served, the question of the amount stored is water under the bridge. So, once a litigation or investigation has begun, other than limiting the review costs, the best way to reduce costs is to reduce the amount collected by limiting custodians, limiting date ranges, and applying appriate keyword limitations to as much data as possible, while using a more intelligent collection process pointed toward the main sources of data that are likely to be most relevant.
Not to say that there aren’t great savings to be achieved by reducing the amount of data that a party retains. Potential parties (which includes every person or entity) has a great incentive to limit the amount of data that is retained, in counterpoint to the great and more easily-recognizable incentive (from an information-access perspective) to maintain a large amount of data. However, a person or entity is unlikely to recognize (or even credit advice that there exists) the incentive to limit data retained – until forced to confront the expense of not limiting data (as a result of being required to collect, review & produce in connection with a lawsuit or investigation).