A company’s ability to leverage information is a key determinant in success, both in the marketplace and in the courtroom. Experts say that companies regularly involved in litigation should follow best e-discovery practices.
Companies that embrace electronic discovery and data mining can not only reduce their pre-trial costs in the long run but they can also gain the upper hand in the courtroom.
Experts say the use of such technology in Canada’s legal profession is still in its infancy compared to that in the United States, but, make no mistake, the days of manually poring through stacks of paper files to prepare for a case are gone forever.
The objective of data mining is to extract valuable information from the reams of data at your disposal — to discover “hidden gold” — while e-discovery is essentially the exchange of information.
“When two sides are litigating and they’re asked to present documents, 98 per cent of documents today are electronic. It used to be you’d hand over 20 boxes [of paper], but now it’s much more sophisticated and complicated, and the amount of data is tremendous,” says Lloyd Rosler, Toronto-based vice president of e-discovery services at KPMG Forensic, a subsidiary of KPMG LLP.
He says many companies have giant data warehouses where they’ve accumulated scores of data and documents, but the ability to leverage that information efficiently is a key determinant in its success, both in the marketplace and in the courtroom.
Rosler says considering the “huge” amounts of data in question, finding a needle in a haystack, by comparison, would be easy.
“If you have 250 gigabytes of data, and you’ve got two lawyers working on it, to review all the documents could take months or years. It can be very time-consuming,” he says.
Rosler says the amount of information lawyers have to deal with in the 21st century “runs the gamut,” but too many of them aren’t up to speed on the time- and money-saving benefits of technology. “There are many lawyers in Canada who don’t know what’s going on and don’t realize how important [technology] is,” he says.
Adopting software that “whittles down the haystack” and identifies relevant documents and files to the case is the best course of action, he says.
“Failure to comply with e-discovery requirements can have drastic consequences for the firm and the client. If one side doesn’t produce documents, and the court believes there’s a lack of fair play, the judge could award the judgment to the other side,” he says.
The good news is there are a growing number of firms specializing in e-discovery and data mining are entering the market. He says several of the newcomers have relayed stories of well-established law firms coming to his team in need of immediate help after underestimating the complexity of e-discovery.
