Law.com Subscribers SAVE 30%
Call 855-808-4530 or email [email protected] to receive your discount on a new subscription.
e-Discovery Technology for the $100,000 (or Less) Case
At LegalTech New York this past February, I spoke with several e-discovery industry thought leaders and asked them what they saw as trends in e-
discovery for the coming year. One of the main trends mentioned by many was e-discovery technology solutions for smaller cases. Historically, e-discovery technology tools have been geared toward the largest of cases from a document and data volume standpoint. Cases with smaller volumes (and often, less dollars at stake), however, have the same needs for efficiencies in the e-discovery process. Fortunately, there are several solutions that benefit these smaller cases.
Small Cases Are No Longer That Small
In the pre-electronic discovery days, when most document collections were primarily paper-based, a million pages of documents was considered a large collection to review and produce. However, as each gigabyte of data is between 50,000 and 100,000 pages, a million pages is only 10 to 20 GB of data. These days, large cases can be one terabyte or more ' that equals more than 75 million pages!
Today, a “small” case of 4 GB (or two maximum size PST files in Outlook' 2003) can still be 300,000 pages or more. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), data in the world has grown from five exabytes (an exabyte is one million terabytes) in 2002 to 988 exabytes in 2010 ' that's almost a 20,000% increase. It's more important to manage larger amounts of data effectively than ever before, but it's important to remember this is also true for the “small” cases.
Supporting Smaller Cases
With this in mind, there are several trends that make cost-effective, defensible e-discovery possible for small cases.
SaaS Cloud Applications
For small cases, the need to be able to access your document collection from anywhere and to collaborate with others is just as important as it is in larger cases. Law firms are no longer reviewing or accessing their collections just within the confines of their offices; they are accessing them from home and sharing them with co-counsel and experts. An increasing number of organizations are turning to the “cloud” and using solutions that are Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. These applications host your data at a third-party provider location and are typically browser based. According to a recent Forrester Research report, the global cloud computing market will grow from 40.7 billion dollars in 2011 to more than 241 billion dollars by 2020 ' nearly a six-fold increase. See, “Sizing the Cloud,” Forrester Research, April 21, 2011, www.forrester.com/rb/Research/sizing_cloud/q/id/58161/t/2.
The advantages of SaaS applications for the small organization or case include:
- No Software to Buy. SaaS applications are provided through a Web browser with minimal (if any) software to install. This eliminates software costs and yearly maintenance fees that are present whether you have any cases that warrant an automated solution or not. Additionally, hosting costs associated with accessing SaaS applications are much more likely to be billable to the client as direct case expenses than software purchases. TotalDiscovery.com, from BIA, is an example of a SaaS application ' it is a Web-based, on-demand ESI collection, processing and filtering platform.
- Updates Are Free and Automatic. Installing or updating software on workstations can require IT support time and costs to address configuration issues (which can add up). Updates of SaaS applications are installed at the host, with little or no impact to individual user workstations and decreasing IT support time.
- Work Anywhere. Access the same collection on your home workstation as you do on your laptop or desktop at the office.
- No Infrastructure Costs. The costs for an organization to provide servers, data storage, bandwidth, security and redundant backups to host their own solutions can be extensive. SaaS application providers are able to distribute those costs over their entire client base, thereby delivering these services at a fraction of the cost to each of their individual clients. OnDemand' from CloudNine Discovery, an SaaS-based e-discovery review platform, uses multiple layers of strict, military-grade security to protect client data, including 24 x 7 x 365 on-site security guards, video surveillance and recording, biometric and card key security and a reinforced physical structure. According to CloudNine Discovery president Brad Jenkins, the hardware and software alone “would cost an organization tens of thousands of dollars to implement in a similar co-location facility.”
Pricing Models
Pay-As-You-Go Pricing
Paying on a monthly basis to host data for collection, review and/or production for only as long as those activities are required enables firms to limit the costs for these services to exactly what they need. The “pay-as-you-go” pricing models have become increasingly popular for this reason, allowing firms to get the most out of e-discovery technology while simultaneously controlling the costs for that technology.
Index Engines' provides a “Look & Learn” cloud service that is, according to VP of Information Discovery Jim McGann, “designed for lower cost cases where resources and budget are an issue.” After the client sends backup tapes to Index Engines' secure lab and those tapes are scanned, the Look & Learn application enables clients to search for and tag relevant data, which is then extracted out and sent to the client. The pricing model for this service is on a per-tape basis for indexing and searching, and per-custodian basis for extraction. Clients are then able to pay only for those tapes that need to be searched and extracted.
Simplified Pricing
When it comes to selecting e-discovery providers, law firms and corporations have historically experienced confusion as to the true cost of those services. Some e-discovery providers have now implemented simplified pricing models to ease this confusion by eliminating charges for set-up fees, user fees, initial training sessions, and so forth.
Informative Graphics (IGC) provides Redact-It Desktop via straightforward per-seat pricing, enabling clients to “save thousands of dollars by significantly shortening how long it takes to review and redact documents,” according to Christine Musil, Director of Marketing. To add OCR support for TIFF and PDF files or additional file format support is another simple per-seat pricing alternative.
Other Benefits
Advanced Data Culling Techniques
One of the recent trends in e-discovery is the growing popularity of Early Case Assessment (ECA) tools that enable organizations to quickly cull down large collections to minimize review costs ' the largest component of e-discovery costs by far. However, ECA tools benefit smaller cases as well. Each GB effectively culled out saves considerable e-discovery costs. Consider the following assumptions:
Estimated Cost to Review All Documents in a GB:
Pages per GB: 75,000
Major Differences In UK, U.S. Copyright Laws
This article highlights how copyright law in the United Kingdom differs from U.S. copyright law, and points out differences that may be crucial to entertainment and media businesses familiar with U.S law that are interested in operating in the United Kingdom or under UK law. The article also briefly addresses contrasts in UK and U.S. trademark law.
The Article 8 Opt In
The Article 8 opt-in election adds an additional layer of complexity to the already labyrinthine rules governing perfection of security interests under the UCC. A lender that is unaware of the nuances created by the opt in (may find its security interest vulnerable to being primed by another party that has taken steps to perfect in a superior manner under the circumstances.
Strategy vs. Tactics: Two Sides of a Difficult Coin
With each successive large-scale cyber attack, it is slowly becoming clear that ransomware attacks are targeting the critical infrastructure of the most powerful country on the planet. Understanding the strategy, and tactics of our opponents, as well as the strategy and the tactics we implement as a response are vital to victory.
Legal Possession: What Does It Mean?
Possession of real property is a matter of physical fact. Having the right or legal entitlement to possession is not "possession," possession is "the fact of having or holding property in one's power." That power means having physical dominion and control over the property.
The Anti-Assignment Override Provisions
UCC Sections 9406(d) and 9408(a) are one of the most powerful, yet least understood, sections of the Uniform Commercial Code. On their face, they appear to override anti-assignment provisions in agreements that would limit the grant of a security interest. But do these sections really work?