The rapid increase in the volume and sources of electronically stored information (ESI) has changed how corporate legal departments plan for and react to litigation and electronic discovery. Gone are the days (one hopes) of rummaging through hundreds of banker’s boxes full of printed documents, reports and scrawled notes looking for privileged or responsive documents. These days, the e-discovery process involves cloud storage, USB thumb drives, DVDs, hard disks, “home” drives, indexing and search software. The one constant in the process is having educated human eyes read large amounts of content to determine whether it’s responsive to the case or privileged.
Traditional e-discovery methods rely on “linear review,” a manual, expensive, time-consuming and error-prone process in which teams of contract attorneys review hundreds of thousands or millions of documents one page at a time.
