Why Does Electronic Discovery Cost So Much?

When business managers get the bill for electronic discovery costs, they almost always ask, "why does this cost so much?" I believe the secret to understanding the cost lies in understanding how we got here. Let's use a library analogy, libraries as they existed before the introduction of computers.

Before computers, libraries were effective because of librarians. The librarians performed two important functions that kept the library running. First, they kept the card catalog current and accurate. Second, they made sure the books were returned to the proper physical location in the shelving system. Companies once stored business records like a library stored books. Clerks and secretaries kept lists of files that worked like card catalogs. They were also responsible for seeing that the files and records were returned to their proper location.

Enter the personal computer. With computers, it was possible for anyone in the organization to create and add large amounts of data to the repository without updating the card catalog or adhering to a standardized physical storage scheme. Imagine trying to use your college library if every student and staff member on campus could create books at will and just toss them anywhere in the library. As companies expanded the availability and use of computers to the entire employee population, they made cost reductions by eliminating the positions that once had responsibility for maintaining the integrity of manual file indexes and storage schemes.

We now have an exponentially larger and rapidly expanding volume of information, virtually unlimited storage, and few requirements for welding documents or e-mail to any intelligence about their origin, purpose or life cycle. Moreover, these data objects are most often stored without regard to any particular scheme or strategy for retrieving them. Rather than spend some incremental dollars in labor and technology to identify and organize information as it goes into these repositories, business has chosen to spend much larger amounts of money to find the needle in the haystack after the fact.