Lower Long-Term E-discovery Costs, Smarter Data Management

As corporate data volumes continue to grow, a primary problem facing general counsel is how to rein in skyrocketing e-discovery costs, regain control of the process and establish cost predictability. Which budgetary line items really matter? Law firms and technology vendors have their own ideas about that, but what cost variables should GCs be looking for? And what best practices can GCs implement to lower their e-discovery and litigation lifecycle costs?

The Limitations of EDRM

While it may seem old, e-discovery is relatively new, and we’re still learning how to meet the legal requirements posed by e-discovery in the ever-evolving digital world.

Up to this point, practitioners have tended to rely on the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) to guide them through the process to maximize efficiency and control cost. However, EDRM merely provides a conceptual view of the e-discovery lifecycle. It doesn’t represent what really happens because litigation support is—or should be—essentially about data management. The primary focus of the model is on what happens to data as it transitions through the various stages of the EDRM. This reflects the industry’s focus on the short-term challenges of individual matters, particularly the technology and expense required to get from one phase to the next. A more useful and enduring model would turn the focus to longer-term strategies for controlling data volumes and sound data management techniques.

Part of the problem lies in vendor responses to clients’ cost concerns. Instead of assisting clients in managing data intelligently, vendors tend to offer rock-bottom per-gigabyte prices and process all of the unfiltered data straight through. Commoditized per-gigabyte pricing is enticing to customers because they can have a standard unit of measurement to compare prices across multiple vendors.

Vendors gladly lower prices because they know they can make up for low margins with higher data volumes. For GCs, however, low per-gigabyte pricing doesn’t begin to solve the persistent problem of exploding data volumes and corresponding increases in the total cost of e-discovery.

Corporations that fail to control data volume inevitably face over-retention and increased costs for both the IT and legal departments. Increased volumes become subject to massive litigation holds and general overprocessing of nonresponsive material. Compounding this, increasing volumes of documents are unnecessarily released into the already-expensive review process, increasing costs for IT to store and maintain the data, and for legal to process and review vast amounts of information.

Vendors who soften the impact of e-discovery costs simply by lowering the unit price are not helping GCs who want to confront the fundamental challenge of managing data subject to pending or anticipated litigation. Which takes us back to EDRM: The reference model is only a model; e-discovery is not simply a matter of pushing existing data through a series of linear “steps” or “stages.”

Roadblocks to Data Management