RAND Study on Electronic Discovery Costs

A RAND study, The Cost of Producing Electronic Documents in Civil Lawsuits, provides some insight into how much businesses are spending on electronic discovery.

It confirms that Review continues to be the most expensive stage of electronic discovery, and that most of the spending goes for work performed by outside counsel.

RAND concludes that the highest number of documents that a person can review in an hour is about 100, and it's not likely that this rate can be improved upon. Email threading; clustering; and near-duplicate detection will not necessarily allow for major improvements in review time.

The study also emphasizes the inconsistent decisions made by human reviewers. "In one case, for example, seven teams of attorneys, all trained in a similar manner and given the same instructions, examined 28,000 documents organized into 12,000 clusters to judge whether the clusters were responsive to the facts of the case. Results showed that the teams agreed only 23 to 54 percent of the time, depending on the pair of teams being compared.". It recommends predictive coding as an alternative.

add page numbering in NotePad++

If you have a text file in NotePad++ that has markers for page breakers, but you need to add in page numbering, follow these steps:

1. Begin by numbering each line so that you can sort them in their original order. Select all, and then go to Edit . . . Column Editor.

2. Select the radio button for 'Number to Insert', and then enter '1' for the 'Initial number' and 'Increase by' fields. Check off the option for 'Leading zeros'.

3. Next run a regular expression find and replace search to move the line numbering to the end of each line:

FIND: ([0-9]{2})(.*$)

REPLACE: \2\1

This searches for any two digit number, and then also selects all of the text to the end of the line - this is what $ is used for in regex. The backslashes followed by numbers reference each regex search in parentheses in the FIND search. Putting them in reverse numerical order will flip the original text order.

4. Now sort all of the lines so the markers at the beginning of each line are grouped together. Go to TextFX . . . TextFX Tools . . . 'Sort lines case insensitive (at column)' with 'Sort ascending' selected.

5. Now just select the lines beginning with the PAGE marker and repeat step 2. To select the lines hold down ALT + SHIFT and use the down arrow key.

6. Use another regex search to move the original numbering for all lines back to the start of each line:

FIND: (^.*)([0-9]{2})

REPLACE: \2\1

. . . the caret '^' is used in regular expression language to find the beginning of a line.

7. Relocate the numbers before each PAGE marker:

FIND: ([0-9]{1})(PAGE)

REPLACE: \2\1

8. Resort the lines:

9. Finally simply remove the line numbers:

FIND: \r\n[0-9]{2}

REPLACE: \r\n

left margin black squares formatting detail in MS Word

When editing a Word document you may come across small black boxes or squares in the left margin when formatting symbols are displayed. It may not be possible to relocate text which includes these marks to other parts of the document. The 'black box' symbol indicates that the text has been formatted so the lines are kept together.

You can remove this formatting for any one line by clicking on any one of the black boxes. This will bring up the Paragraph dialog box. On the 'Line and Page Breaks' tab, unclick 'Keep lines together'. To remove the setting for several lines, select them all, and on the Home ribbon go into Paragraph and make the same change.