James Moeskops reflects on how technology and costs, if not practice, have changed since the early days of e-Discovery.
In the early days of electronic disclosure/discovery, addressing the requirement to review and disclose large volumes of electronic documents was time consuming and the technologies available at the time were of marginal assistance to lawyers.
To illustrate how far the technology has advanced and costs fallen, I will use the example of one of Millnet’s earliest large scale electronic disclosure engagements, which was assisting a law firm client on one of the largest matters then seen. We were initially engaged in 2002 to process approximately 100GB of predominantly email data and to present the processed data in an online review platform. We took approximately 12 months to complete the document collection, processing and loading phase and the lawyers took a further 2-3 years to review everything. Millnet’s fees were upwards of £1 million over a 3 year period (with most of the earliest electronic processing being completed on a per page basis because everyone was used to paying for photocopying on this basis).
Fast forward to 2011. Were we to be engaged on an identical project today, we would have the entire 100GB of data processed in a matter of hours and available in a far more efficient and sophisticated online review database within 48 hours at a cost of circa £50K.
