Electronic Discovery Costs And Burdens Require New Rules
"More than just gross volume and multiple, disparate locations, electronic information is infamous for its complexity. Finding it, moving it, and understanding it may require a number of different disciplines and a variety of components.
Court rules now frequently involve an extensive search through many separate computer systems. Electronic media has become the nearly exclusive manner of producing and storing information in the corporate world.
For many litigants, the electronic data that accumulates on a daily basis is vast and difficult to manage. Much of this data is stored in reasonably accessible sources, which people use in the ordinary course of business, but vast quantities of this data are also preserved in sources that are not reasonably accessible, such as back-up storage media used for disaster recovery. Furthermore, substantial amounts of information consist of files that have been purportedly "deleted," yet may still be recovered (albeit at significant burden and expense). Requiring a litigant to restore and retrieve data at its own expense from back-up tapes, "deleted" files, and other sources that are not readily accessible is having significant negative financial impact and resulting in substantial interference to the day-to-day business activities of many litigants.
When discovery processes were put in place, data of such magnitude and complexity were unfathomable."
Court rules now frequently involve an extensive search through many separate computer systems. Electronic media has become the nearly exclusive manner of producing and storing information in the corporate world.
For many litigants, the electronic data that accumulates on a daily basis is vast and difficult to manage. Much of this data is stored in reasonably accessible sources, which people use in the ordinary course of business, but vast quantities of this data are also preserved in sources that are not reasonably accessible, such as back-up storage media used for disaster recovery. Furthermore, substantial amounts of information consist of files that have been purportedly "deleted," yet may still be recovered (albeit at significant burden and expense). Requiring a litigant to restore and retrieve data at its own expense from back-up tapes, "deleted" files, and other sources that are not readily accessible is having significant negative financial impact and resulting in substantial interference to the day-to-day business activities of many litigants.
When discovery processes were put in place, data of such magnitude and complexity were unfathomable."
