e-Discovery Undersized

e-Discovery conjures up visions of millions of documents and cases that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Although these are the cases that make the headlines, the average litigation typically involves less than 10,000 records, or about one gigabyte of electronic data.

When law clerks describe “a small document” collection, the usual approach is to either print everything out for review, convert everything to tiff images, or review the native files without any special, e-discovery tools. As anyone who reads this blog (and countless others on the net) knows, these are the least efficient, and most costly methods, regardless of the collection size.

While it will not cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to deal with a small volume of electronic information, e-discovery methodologies developed for large document cases, including near duplicate and email thread grouping, statistical sampling, predictive coding, and content analysis, can be equally applied to small cases to ensure that the overall discovery cost is as low as possible.

For example, a 10,000 record collection would require a review of about 400 records in order to apply predictive coding or statistical sampling. Given the current pricing of the various predictive coding solutions, it would cost under $500 to analyse this data. Combine that with about 10 hours of lawyer time to review the 400 documents, and you would have your records all sorted and prioritized. You can then shave off the ones that are likely to be irrelevant, skip the ones you’ve already reviewed, and probably spend another 10 hours or so reviewing the rest. Compare that to the cost to print out 10 bankers boxes of paper, along with the manual (and tedious) lawyer review, and you can clearly see how this approach can save thousands of dollars and millions of brain cells.

​Wortzman Nickle can add value to any size case. Call us to find out how.