Patent litigation is expensive, and e-discovery costs can drive a significant portion of that expense. But runaway e-discovery costs are not inevitable; in-house counsel can and should employ strategies to control these costs when litigating a patent suit.
For purposes of this article, e-discovery costs include costs for data preservation, collection and processing of electronically stored information (ESI), document hosting and document review. Although attorney fees for e-discovery disputes do not fall cleanly under the e-discovery umbrella, we consider these, as well, because of the havoc they can wreck on a case budget.
