The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are supposed to be “construed and administered to secure the just, speedy and inexpensive determination of every action and proceeding.” Yet, as anyone who has ever been tasked with handling discovery in complex litigation knows, the judicial system has struggled to reconcile this overarching goal with the explosion of electronically stored information (ESI) and the corresponding skyrocketing of e-discovery costs.
Despite various attempts at e-discovery reform over the past decade, studies indicate that discovery continues to account for the vast majority of the cost of civil litigation. Indeed, according to one survey, discovery is responsible for 70 percent of total litigation costs in cases that are not tried. Litigants can spend upwards of $18,000 to collect, process and review a single gigabyte of data. And in large cases, potentially responsive data can measure in the hundreds or even thousands of gigabytes. We are facing the very opposite of inexpensive.
