2021 State of E-Discovery

Exterro has released its 2021 report on The State of E-Discovery . Here are some key findings about the direction the industry is heading in.

• 45 percent of legal departments have reported an increase in legal disputes as a result of the COVID pandemic, while only 7 percent have reported a decrease.

• 38 percent of electronic discovery professionals have taken on more responsibilities because of the pandemic.

• There has been an increase in the number of legal departments with a legal operations specialist, a 39.4% increase since 2015.

• Legal departments are using e-discovery technology to save time and money, and do more work in-house.

• 35 percent of legal departments still use ad hoc electronic discovery processes.

• 71 percent of smaller legal departments don't have an electronic discovery team.

• 56 percent of legal personnel have performed electronic discovery remotely.

• 50 percent of government agencies have processes to collect data.

• 87 percent of government agencies have increasing volumes of data.

• More than half of respondents reported having an 'immature' electronic discovery function.

• 40 percent of businesses see more disputes arising from data privacy and cybersecurity issues.

Document Numbering Down Under: Australian Document Management Protocols

In Australia, the courts have mandated each document collected for a matter have a unique document ID assigned to it, which it then retains regardless of whether or not the document is produced. A document ID is assigned during processing, and is not changed. This necessitates that PDFs be prepared for each document during processing, so specific page numbers can be assigned to documents which are not produced in native form. The pagination must be fixed ahead of production.

Schedule 1 of the Default Document Management Protocol to the Federal Court of Australia's Practice Note CM 6 provides Document IDs be in the format, 'SSS-NNNN', with SSS specifying a party code. It also states that courts may order Document IDs to be in this format: SSS-BBB-FFF-NNNN', with BBB signifying a box number, email mailbox, or some other appropriate classifier. FFF represents a folder for a further level of organization. The number of digits used may vary. The protocol is very influential in Australia, and shows up widely in production guidelines. See for example, the Document Production Guidelines of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission:

The protocol sets very specific guidelines for litigators down under to follow, listing the field to be used in a document description spreadsheet in Schedule 6, and a list of document types to use in Schedule 7.

Schedule 5 to the protocol states that page numbers be placed in the top right corner 3 mm from the top and right edges of a page.

TCR

TCR is a commonly used abbreviation for ‘total

cost of review’ This is the amount spent on a complete e-discovery workflow. A team with Relativity analyzed TCR and has reported its results here.

As the below chart shows:

Review cost still takes up most of the budget, with processing cost coming in a distant second. Collection and hosting fees are minimal.

The study shows that targeted collection will reduce TCR in the long run, if not in the first couple of months.

According to the study, if targeted collection is performed, in the end TCR will be reduced by almost a third.