For a number of years, many courts have been adopting “fast track” procedures, mandating that cases go to trial within one year of filing a lawsuit. See, e.g., Cal. Ct. Rules 208, 209 (employment litigation). For example, in the Eastern District of Texas, Judge Ward's local rules have laid out strict guidelines and provide for early discovery deadlines. These early deadlines push cases forward and force parties to spend time, effort and money to quickly produce potentially relevant electronically stored information (ESI) for litigation. See, Appendix M Patent Rules, 3-3, 3-4 April 21, 2011.

Combine this with Gartner's estimates that data will grow 800 percent over the next five years and 80 percent of that data will be unstructured, provides counsel with a significant early case assessment (ECA) challenge. It's unstructured ESI that is most difficult to deal with because the data is stored on laptops, desktops and servers, and it is very difficult to manually search and collect that data without altering the metadata (see my July 29 column for metadata guidelines). Effective ECA is the solution for this dilemma of needing to quickly assess and understand the vast and growing amount of data for litigation.

Having knowledge of this information helps in-house legal teams to quickly assess a case's merits, costs and risks as soon as possible to make better and faster case decisions.