Digital White Papers

LITIGATION AND PRACTICE SUPPORT 25 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER An Australian Perspective on Avoiding Hidden E-Discovery Costs Hidden Costs in Processing Where the legal profession used to be obsessed with paper, now it is all about the PDF. Because of the PDF being everyone's favorite file type, e-discovery costs have grown exponentially as millions of email messages, family holiday photos and duplicated documents are being rendered into PDF, with optical character recognition (OCR) and pagination applied. Lawyers like the idea of rendering everything into PDF so document reviews will go smoothly, and no more costs will be incurred. But people forget two things: While everything is geing fully processed, i.e., rendered into PDF files and paginated, searches and other kinds of analyses are still being conducted in the review platform. Only a small set of documents will be reviewed, and an even smaller set will actually require the proper rendered format for document production. Most law firms today have a perfectly competent document review platform that provides in-browser display of common file types in native format without the need to open native applications or slow down the document review process. While rendered PDFs are preferred by many because all documents are readily available to produce, such peace of mind is expensive. We recently had a maer with an accumulated one TB of data, and the lawyers wanted to review everything in the review platform. We produced just under 11 million documents in their fully rendered PDF form and later learned that only 500,000 would be considered for review aer keyword searches –– still a large number, but only five percent of the original data. Even fewer documents, possibly less than one percent of the original data, will be produced. All that rendering cost could have been saved for the client. If clients knew of these options and made informed decisions, it would be another story; but I doubt many lawyers or vendors go into the processing details to show their clients how much they are spending. Native processing and rendered PDF processing costs can differ by around $200 per GB. For one TB of data, the cost difference can be between $80,000 and $200,000. Lawyers no longer must choose between PDF files and waiting for an Office application to open every single native file during document review. Modern review platforms such as Everlaw have invested a lot to support native files, especially spreadsheets, without the need to install any third-party soware. In Everlaw, for instance, the spreadsheet formaing is well-kept and hidden rows and columns are displayed. Reviewers can even see the formula used for each cell. When native file formats can be displayed neatly in the review platform, it is a waste not to use the function. Other features such as audio/video in-browser display and in-line translation are also provided by good document review platforms to streamline the native review process. The hidden costs of the e-discovery process can grow with few people noticing, but a good review platform immediately drives down processing costs and time. We have to question: Are we using the right tool for the job? If your document review platform requires extra rendering at the client's expense, it could be time for an upgrade. You 1 2

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