But with a mix of low-cost tools, and careful attention to process, you can realize defensible e-discovery on the cheap. Volume is a challenge in these cases, too. Most entail review of material collected from a handful of custodians in familiar Microsoft Office formats, Outlook e-mail, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations. Tools designed for ESI review save considerable time over cobbled-together methods.

When every action is extrapolated across millions of messages and documents, seconds saved add up to big productivity gains. If you’re grappling with millions of files and messages, you’ll need to turn to some pretty pricy power tools. So let’s explore affordable, off-the-shelf ways to get you to your destination.įirst, let’s set sensible expectations: Vast, varied productions of electronically stored information cannot be efficiently or affordably managed and reviewed with software from Best Buy. A Mercedes and a Mazda both get you where you need to go, but the EDD industry has no Mazdas on the lot. The big boys simply have better toys.Ī hurdle for everyone else is the unavailability and high cost of specialized software to process and review electronic evidence. Big law firms deploy sophisticated in-house or hosted review platforms that let armies of associates and contract lawyers plow through vast plains of data - viewing, tagging, searching, sorting and redacting with a few keystrokes. Corporate clients hire pricey vendors with loads of computing power to index, search, de-duplicate, convert and manage terabytes of data.

Marketing hype aside, big firm litigators don’t know much more about EDD than solo practitioners. If you think big firms succeed at EDD because they know more than you do, think again. Today, evidence means electronic evidence so, like the courts themselves, access to evidence can’t be just for the privileged. Some Neanderthal notions take longer than others to get shown the door, and it’s time to explode the myth that e-discovery is just for the country club set. And suffrage is just for white, male landowners. Electronic data discovery is just for big budget cases involving big companies, handled by big firms.

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