Monday, May 3, 2010

Getting Ediscovery to Work for You

Locating, securing and producing all the electronically stored information required in the discovery phase of civil litigation can be very time consuming and extremely expensive. However, failure to produce the required information in a timely fashion can lead to fines running into millions of dollars, thanks to revisions to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that came into effect in December 2006.

Many companies still deal with e-discovery obligations by outsourcing the process to external specialists, who may charge between $250 and $1,400 per gigabyte to sift through corporate data, collect what is relevant, and get it in to a form that can be submitted to lawyers for review. In the past five years, an increasing number of companies have begun treating e-discovery as a routine business process that can be performed in-house. Many of these companies use e-discovery software to help carry out this business process more efficiently.

E-discovery software is designed to enable the efficient undertaking of various stages of the e-discovery process defined in the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRF), which establishes guidelines for e-discovery. These stages include the identification, preservation, collection, processing, review and analysis of corporate information. Research house Gartner said e-discovery solutions may cost more than $500,000, but in some organizations they can pay for themselves in as little as three months or after a single big law case. That's because the cost of software can be offset against fees that would otherwise be paid to outside service providers to process data for discovery and against the reduction in legal fees charged by outside attorneys reviewing large amounts of written electronic material. Little wonder the market for e-discovery software is expected to grow more than 20 percent per year for the next three years, according to Gartner estimates.

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