When parties to a big lawsuitcouldn’t agree on a vendorto host an electronic documentrepository, the courtappointed me to help. Poring over multimilliondollar bids, I saw the vendorswere told to assume that a gigabyte of dataequals 22,500 pages. If the dozens of entitiesinvolved produced their documents ina mix of TIF images and native formats –spreadsheets, word-processed documents,e-mail, compressed archives, maps, photos,engineering drawings — how sensiblewas it to assume 22,500 pages per gigabyte?
It’s comforting to quantify electronicallystored information as some numberof pieces of paper or bankers’ boxes. Paperand lawyers are old friends. But you can’treliably equate a volume of data with anumber of pages unless you know thecomposition of the data. Even then, it’sa leap of faith. I’ve been railing againstpage equivalency claims for years becausethey’re so elusive and often abused to misstatethe burden and cost of electronicdata discovery.
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