“If your clients don’t have a records management system, they may as well take their money out into the parking lot and set it on fire.”
– Former U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge John Facciola
We all know that ediscovery is expensive, and various research reports have so confirmed. The definitive Rand study, Where the Money Goes: Understanding Litigant Expenditures for Producing Electronic Discovery, found that median costs for collection, processing, and review are $17,507 per gigabyte (roughly 3,500 documents or 10,000 e-mails). The math is not pretty – a case involving 482 GBs of source data could exceed $8 million in ediscovery costs.
And on top of that are preservation costs. The Preservation Costs Survey demonstrated that large companies incur significant fixed costs for preservation (for in-house ediscovery personnel and also for procurement and maintenance of legal hold management and data preservation technology systems), averaging $2.5 million annually. More significant is the cost of employee time lost in complying with legal holds. While companies with up to 10,000 employees incur the average time cost of over $428,000 per year, costs for the largest companies exceed $38 million per year.
There is indeed great complexity in how to cost-effectively process huge amounts of data through the ediscovery funnel. Tighter management of ediscovery processes continues to be important.
But as we ponder how to cut costs, let’s not confuse symptoms with causes:
Continue Reading Why govern our information? Reason #12: Unnecessary business data causes unnecessary litigation costs
How time flies. Seventeen years ago, I went to work for a small, visionary company based in Seattle—Computer Forensics, Inc. Indeed, the founder was so early in the e-discovery and forensics industry that our URL was forensics.com. Laptop drives typically had 8 GB of storage, and servers were more often than not simply a bigger box that sat in a closet.
Our firm’s elephant icon is a nod to 
Facebook this week announced its new social media application targeted at children, 
Tom Hanks excels at illuminating our nation’s history, from John Adams to Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan, Bridge of Spies, Apollo 13, and Charlie Wilson’s War. Much of the impact springs from Hanks’ reverence for the primary source materials – the underlying records – that ground these compelling stories in the integrity of historical truth. So it was no surprise last month when the National Archives Foundation honored Hanks with 
We’re addicted to information, but we can’t stand to think about it again once we’ve seen it, saved it, hoarded it. Why? We collect or create it in the moment, but have no thought or plan for its future. Even when it was once and briefly useful, neglected information soon becomes the effluvium of our digital landfills. And, like most landfills, the odor is disagreeable and no one wants to be near it.
bage in, garbage out” – we know that already, right? Well … what we know about information quality and what we do are not always in sync. Just for kicks, consider information quality through the lens of the industrial quality movement.
American architect Louis Sullivan, who coined the iconic phrase “form ever follows function,” was flat wrong – at least when it comes to the relationship of what we do and how we capture it with data. The reality is instead that the medium shapes the message, and that record-keeping alters the processes it records. Need a current example? One only has to consider how the President’s staccato bursts of tweets now drive public attention, media focus, and policy debates, both domestically and abroad.