In order to analyze the reasons that Lehman Brothers failed in September 2008, Jenner & Block mined the company’s electronically stored information (ESI) containing an estimated three petabytes of data–roughly of 350 billion pages of documents–for relevant issues. That’s 150 times more than all the information in the Library of Congress.
The law firm used electronic review technology to pare down the huge collection. Still, the bill for the page-by-page linear (manual) review of the remaining 40 million pages by 70 contract attorneys at rates averaging $50 per hour came to nearly $6 million, according to Robert Byman, a partner at Jenner. Sifting through all the ESI at the same rates without the initial computer-aided review would have cost a staggering $52.5 billion.
