E-discovery still confounds companies and their lawyers
"Legal discovery is not a cookie-cutter process. Each corporate environment and case is different. E-discovery is expensive and will likely remain expensive. What's more, the e-discovery process itself is fraught with security issues; but companies can do a lot to minimize costs, strengthen their hand in court, and avoid sanctions while securing information. IT plays a critical role.
Companies and their lawyers typically overreact, attempting to preserve everything, for example, in backup tapes. This just adds to expenses -- IT folks reuse backup tapes for a reason -- and make it harder to sift through terabytes of information.
The greatest cost comes during the review process. Even with new search technologies, information still has to be eye-balled to ensure it's what you're looking for. And there's a lot of it. Mass storage is cheap, and employees can spread information among themselves and scatter it on servers, laptops, PDAs and smartphones, removable storage devices and home computers. Restoring data from backups and imaging files, and cleaning up metadata and OCR to produce documents in their final form for lawyers is costly."
