eDiscovery Daily Blog

The Importance of Early Data Assessment: eDiscovery Best Practices

Why do we have a picture of Santa Claus for an eDiscovery blog post about early data assessment?  Read on.

In the Fall 2016 eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey conducted last month, over a third of all respondents cited Increasing Volumes of Data as expected to be most impactful to the business of eDiscovery over the next six months.  With more and more data to manage, understanding what you have in that data as early as possible has become more important than ever as you attempt to plan the budget for your upcoming discovery efforts.

Knowing how much data you have in gigabytes (GB) or terabytes (TB) that may be subject to litigation isn’t enough to accurately estimate the number of files you have.  As we’ve discussed before, the number of files in each gigabyte can vary widely.

Why is that important?  The more files you have, the more files you potentially have to review.  With review costs estimated to be between 70-80 percent of all eDiscovery costs, a lot more files to review can drive up eDiscovery costs significantly.  Wouldn’t it be better to know early in the case how many files you have?

That’s where early data assessment comes in.  The ability to assess your data early enables you to better estimate your eDiscovery costs, so that you can decide whether to settle or litigate and also so that you can plan resources if you do decide to litigate.

In addition to determining the number of files that you have, it’s also beneficial to determine the expanded size of your collection after processing (so that you can estimate costs for storing or hosting that collection) to determine how many different types of files you have and how many files and data volume is comprised by each file type.  Also, whether any of the files are exception files, such as corrupt or password protected files.  Those files can take a lot of time to address, adding costs to the eDiscovery process.

Want more?  It’s also important to determine how many emails and attachments you have, how many domains those emails represent and also how many email conversations are encompassed with those emails.  And, the timelines for your email collection, so you can identify potential gaps in your collection.

Early data assessment can provide all of that information to you at the outset of litigation.

Here’s the best news: it doesn’t have to cost anything to perform that early data assessment.  CloudNine is offering free early data assessment reporting to provide your organization with valuable information to help shape its litigation strategy.  Consider it an early holiday present this season!  You’re welcome, and happy holidays!

I told you to read on, right?  :o)

So, what do you think?  Do you perform assessment of your data early in the litigation life cycle?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

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