Our Insights on eDiscovery

Late on a Thursday night, with a variety of tasks and projects on my plate at the moment, it seems more difficult this night to find a unique and suitable topic for today’s blog post. One thing I often do when looking for ideas is to hit the web and turn to the many resources that I read regularly to stay abreast of developments in the industry. Usually when I do that, I find one article or blog post that “speaks to me” as a topic to talk about on this blog. However, when doing so last night, I found several topics worth discussing and had difficulty selecting just one. So, here are some of the notable articles and posts that I’ve been reviewing.

A few months ago, we published a three part series regarding testing your eDiscovery searches using sampling. We discussed how to determine the appropriate sample size to test your search, using a sample size calculator (freely available on the web). We also discussed how to make sure the sample size is randomly selected (again referencing a site freely available on the web for generating the random set). We even walked through an example of how you can test and refine a search using sampling, saving tens of thousands in review costs with defensible results. Instead of having to go to all of these external sites to manually size and generate your random sample set, it’s even better when the eDiscovery ECA or review software you’re using handles that process for you.

Yesterday, we evaluated what others are saying and noted popular eDiscovery prediction trends for the coming year. It’s interesting to identify common trends among the prognosticators and also the unique predictions as well. But we promised our own predictions for today, so here they are. One of the nice things about writing and editing a daily eDiscovery blog is that it forces you to stay abreast of what’s going on in the industry. Based on the numerous stories we’ve read (many of which we’ve also written about), and in David Letterman “Top 10” fashion, here are our eDiscovery predictions for 2012.

With a nod to Nick Bakay, “It’s all so simple when you break things down scientifically.” The late December/early January time frame is always when various people in eDiscovery make their annual predictions as to what trends to expect in the coming year. I know what you’re thinking – “oh no, not another set of eDiscovery predictions!” However, at eDiscovery Daily, we do things a little bit differently. We like to take a look at other predictions and see if we can spot some common trends. Ten sets of predictions in all! Here are the trends.