Preservation requires parties to ensure that electronically stored information (ESI) “is protected against inappropriate alteration or destruction,” states the Electronic Discovery Reference Model. Collection, on the other hand, entails “gathering ESI for further use in the e-discovery process,” EDRM continues. Collection is something that many teams simply equate with preservation—if ESI is preserved, then it is collected and is fed into the review process. This mistake results in inflated ESI review costs.??

The Rand Institute for Civil Justice’s 2012 report, “Where the Money Goes: Understanding Litigant Expenditures for Producing Electronic Discovery,” found that just 8 percent of the total cost of producing electronic items stems from collection. The report also acknowledges the respondents admitted to not tracking these costs in any systematic way. Perhaps this results from IT departments failing to track hours, or maybe the difficulty of assessing hourly costs and processing overhead. No matter the cause for this lack of public data, collection of rapidly increasing amounts of electronic information—stored in multiple locations, for multiple custodians, relating to multiple issues—is expensive to collect and even more expensive to review. Without a smart collection process, culling of the data set relies on the old and error-prone keyword selection process.

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