Like the rest of the world, there are increasing eDiscovery volumes in New Zealand, requiring smarter ways to manage this information.
Recently LawTalk published an article of mine – “Effectively managing New Zealand’s increasing discovery volumes”. The article highlighted how important it is to effectively manage the increasing data volumes that exist in the discovery process.
Increasing eDiscovery volumes
It is simply a myth for anyone undertaken discovery in New Zealand to think data volumes are not increasing at a rapid rate.
We are all communicating differently than we did in the past, whilst the devices we use to communicate, and store information continue to evolve.
Looking back a few years in New Zealand it may have been typical for a dispute to only have a few gigabytes (GBs), but now it is very common to see in excess of 100GB if not more as the starting point for discovery.
Let’s take a dispute with a couple of individuals. Solely looking at their emails, it is not uncommon to see 4-5GB per person, equating to 10GB.
I reinforced it is important to get to only what you need quickly and cost effectively. This all starts by being able to efficiently isolate the information that is totally irrelevant.
The greatest obstacle in most discovery exercises is the considerable increase in the amount of irrelevant information.
On most matters, the amount of key discoverable documents may not be too different to the numbers experienced previously. The skill is to come up with methods and leverage the use of technology to get rid of what you don’t need so that you can devote your energies at only looking at what matters most.
To get started, it is worth investing an hour at the outset of a matter to work out the best way to approach the discovery exercise. The time invested at the outset could save thousands down the track, not to mention lessening the burden for you and your firm.
My final takeaway was –
Like the rest of the world, the volumes of data experienced in the discovery process in New Zealand continue to increase rapidly, requiring smarter ways to manage this information. The skill is to find an effective method get through this information so you can focus on only what you need in a way that is quick & cost-effective.
You can read the full LawTalk article here.
