The High Cost of E-discovery and How to Avoid It

The ability of email and computer processing to make our lives easier can’t be overstated, neither can the ability of these tools to make life exceedingly complex for litigants.  If you are embroiled in complex litigation where electronic data is relevant and needs to be reviewed for production, you are faced with a potential vast amount of work and a correspondingly vast expense.  Yet, there are some ways to cut down on this expense.
 
First and foremost, the cost of legal representation in collecting, organizing, and reviewing electronic data can be debilitating.   Normally, your trial lawyer will supervise electronic discovery efforts.  As a rough estimation, you can expect to pay between $2.70 and $4.00 per document for a typical e-discovery case.   This being so, the primary way to lower your legal bill on e-discovery matters is to ensure you have a narrow range of documents in your universe.  To this end, you should instruct your counsel to make the confines of the discovery sought narrow, or else determine a good way to limit the documents that will be reviewed while preserving key documents.
 
Several tools exist to limit the range of documents searched in a database of electronic documents.  These include sampling of certain categories of documents and having documents crawled for key terms.  A key to using these methods is  securing the cooperation of opposing counsel, who, if reasonable, can make life easier, and if unreasonable, will necessitate costly motion practice, where the court determines the reasonableness of the search.
 
In addition to these steps, companies can take affirmative steps before a lawsuit commences to ensure that practical procedures are in place to track emails and other electronic data.  Without these procedures, firms can be subject to costly court sanctions for destruction of evidence.