E-Discovery: The end can justify the means

http://ow.ly/7hifG




This is an article by Steven Hunter on the website insidecounsel.com.

This article provides various statistics about the costs of eDiscovery, and discusses some challenges associated with the process.  In addition, the author provides some examples of how damaging electronic evidence can be to a specific case.  Smoking gun evidence has certainly existed in email or electronic form in many high profile cases.

The article states, "As you consider how much of your litigation budget to allocate to electronic discovery, you should keep in mind that the proverbial “needle in a haystack” of electronic documents is significantly sharper than the ones you’re accustomed to finding in a warehouse."

The article also mentions, "Today’s business is conducted electronically. In 2010, 2.9 billion e-mail accounts, 2.4 billion instant messaging accounts and 2.2 billion social networking accounts churned out 107 trillion e-mails, 25 billion Tweets and 30 billion pieces of Facebook content, and at least 25 percent of it was business-related. (Radicati, S., “E-Mail Statistics Report, 2010”, The Radicati Group, Inc.)."