As we say goodbye, and in some cases good riddance, to 2017, it’s time to leave behind archaic, slow, and expensive eDiscovery practices as well.
For decades now, eDiscovery has been a burden on legal professionals and on the legal system as a whole. Attorneys spend hours, days, weeks slogging through massive document dumps in order to find useful evidence. Clients complain about excessive collection and the astonishing, unpredictable costs of third-party vendors. Judges lament that growing discovery costs risk keeping litigants out of court altogether.
All this as discovery becomes ever more important. In 2018, more than ever before, our lives and communication will be digitized and stored—a growing tsunami of data coming from emails, smart speakers, fitness trackers, and even drones. Data is exploding, with 2.5 exabytes of data produced every day. That’s 2.5 billion gigabytes or about 75 trillion pages worth of data created daily. And it’s almost all discoverable.
Imaging dealing with that data under the archaic system of eDiscovery vendors, brute force document review, and legacy software—not to mention deadlines that haven’t lengthened despite this explosion in data. Get it wrong and your case could be damaged, your costs could spiral out of control, your professional reputation could be tarnished.
It’s eDiscovery hell. But it doesn’t have to be.
New eDiscovery tools are making it possible to eliminate the risks inherent to the discovery process. Projects can now be started in minutes, rather than days or weeks. And finding relevant data—the needles in the terabytes of hay, so to speak—can be as easy as Google searching. This technology automates thousands of steps that used to be vended out to expensive third parties. It easily filters documents down to those that matter and culls out those that don’t. It even has built-in safeguards to help protect against producing privileged information.
This allows enterprising attorneys to transform data and discovery from a burden to an opportunity. Projects that once cost hundreds of thousands of dollars can now be done for a fraction of that price. Processes that once required expensive outside vendors can now be brought in-house, controlling costs for clients and creating a new profit center for law firms. And all of this can happen quickly, securely, and easily.
You don’t get buried under data. You use it to your benefit.
Firms that embrace such technology now have a distinct advantage over the flat-footed competitors. They can, in short, 10x their discovery game and thrive in this new era of data growth, thanks to new technology.
This is the promise of Instant Discovery, as Logikcull co-founder and CEO Andy Wilson explained at the Clio Cloud Conference this past fall. If you missed the presentation, don’t worry. It’s now available online (and right below) for your viewing pleasure. Check it out, then resolve to make 2018 the year you 10x your discovery game and get yourself out of discovery hell for good.
