Electronic discovery, otherwise known as e-discovery, has exponentially increased the number of documents exchanged during litigation, as in Race Tires America v. Hoosier Racing Tire. E-discovery has also contributed significantly to soaring pretrial costs. Fortunately, there are strategies a litigation team can use to reduce documents produced and received. For example, we can object to overbroad discovery. We can offer or request summary information to replace raw data when review of that data is unnecessary (e.g., financial spreadsheets reflecting purchased products where that issue is relevant). We can demand that search terms be applied to custodians instead of agreeing to search all emails from custodians. We can test our search terms using early case assessment strategies and revise those terms when they miss the mark.
These demonstrative strategies are important because they allow us to save our clients significant amounts of money. But these are not the only tools we can implement to be more efficient and best represent our clients.
