In today’s world, document review in any case with moderate-to-large amounts of e-data consumes a substantial portion of the litigation budget. Although the gold standard for such review long has been an exhaustive manual process in which human eyes review every document, increasing amounts of raw data frequently make this strategy a non-option.
It’s simple math. Imagine that a litigant collects 1 million potentially relevant e-documents not a large amount by today’s standards. The litigation team trains a room full of contract attorneys and gives them chunks of data to review. Assuming the contract attorneys review these documents at the rate of one per minute, even at $50 per hour, the initial review stage alone costs more than $833,000. Under that scenario, the gold standard earns its name, and not in a good way.
