E-discovery is a $20 billion industry that is growing exponentially. It has become a staple of American civil litigation — the most expensive and time-consuming part of pretrial practice.
Given the volume of emails alone (more than 3 billion U.S. business emails daily); that 90 percent of all documents generated are electronic; and that a single hard drive has a storage equivalency of 40 million pages, e-discovery is the proverbial “Pandora’s box” that U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal of the Southern District of Texas so aptly described in her summer 2010 article in The Advocate . Rosenthal chronicled the state of affairs: “Is e-discovery working? Yes (most cases); In every case? No; Systemic Failure? No; Perception of a larger failure? Yes (to some extent). . . .”
