The first phase of a study jointly commissioned by the eDiscovery Institute and Oracle (click here to read more) has shown that, while using technology assisted review will lower the cost of e-discovery, the “assisted” part is a key component in the equation.

The study involved a number of software manufacturers and lit support vendors each attempting to replicate document requests from real litigation where the producing party was confident that it produced all requested records.

Some key findings included:

• Although there were several different systems it used, the major differentiator in performance was not the software – it was the people training the software.
• The per-document cost to review was between $0.03 and $0.89.
• Using a single, subject matter expert to train a system resulted in significantly better results than using a team of contract reviewers, where everything else was equal.
• Using a combination of local and foreign review lawyers produced the second best results at a much lower per-document cost than the top performer.

​Clearly, using technology will help to reduce the cost of legal review, but the quality of that review is very dependent on who is using the technology.

Information Governance (IG) is becoming a more familiar term around the company water cooler, but it doesn’t seem be discussed very much anywhere else in the corporate landscape. With the recent high profile data breeches, escalating e-discovery costs, and sanctions (in the U.S.) over poor legal holds, along with ever expanding digital volumes, why isn’t IG front and centre in the organization’s priorities?

There are a number of reasons why IG is difficult to get excited about:

• It is a program that encompasses many different departments and corporate initiatives, including legal, security, IT, and records management. Trying to find consensus and budget funds between all of these somewhat competing groups is difficult, if not impossible.
• There is no easy solution, such as purchasing a software package or piece of hardware, to solve the IG issues faced by the organization.
• IG’s benefits are not easy to quantify, making it difficult to obtain sufficient budget funds to implement it.
• The IG stakeholders with the greatest ability to bring all necessary parties together and allocate funds are usually the ones with the least interest or knowledge of IG.

​So what’s a poor organization to do? Clearly, it’s necessary to get C-suite buy-in and figure out what incentive will entice each stakeholder. A plan that implements IG over time using small incremental changes is likely to achieve more than trying to ram IG down the corporate throat.