Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/45522
preceding the 2006 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), to the widespread discussion of landmark cases like the Zubulakes (1 through 4) and Victor Stanley, into current dialog about predictive coding and the unfathomable size (and accelerating growth) of many litigants' electronically stored information (ESI) mountains, a staggeringly pervasive problem has emerged — one that stands to dwarf Sarbanes-Oxley (the prior record- holder for information-related tsunamis). At nearly five years and counting, there is virtually no judge, practitioner or law journal offering a view that the legal system has solved the problem of locating, retrieving and managing evidence in the myriad electronic forms found in the possession, custody and control of many (if not most) of today's litigants. So how does one address the rising challenges around electronic evidence and keep the risk of malpractice lawsuits at bay? THERE'S NO STOPPING ELECTRONIC DATA Much has been written about the risks and impact of e-discovery in legal cases of all sizes and across the wide span of practice areas. A casual Internet search for e-discovery issues turns up millions of hits in cases ranging from family law disputes and class-action product liability to matters of homeland security and criminal investigations. It seems that no facet of the legal system is untouched by e-discovery's ubiquitous nature — or without increasing media scrutiny about its impact. It is the unfortunate reality, however, that litigants whose ESI stores are the largest and most complex — large companies — bear the overwhelming proportion of the costs of e-discovery, and whose e-discovery difficulties often garner the most spectacular bad press. Just how much ESI exists in large companies is a subject that has been studied and discussed extensively. Judge Scheindlin's excellent tome, "Electronic Discovery and Digital Evidence — Cases and Materials" (co-authored with Daniel Capra), distilled findings from several major studies and leading experts into a compelling chapter on the mind-numbing size and rate of growth of corporate ESI stockpiles. Some astonishing examples include: • The average amount of data in Fortune 1,000 companies grew almost 10 times from 2003 to 2007 (190 terabytes to a petabyte). • The amount of new ESI generated per person (worldwide) is almost 800 megabytes (about a 30-foot stack of books in paper form) PER YEAR. Noted authorities like Ralph Losey help make the massive volume of ESI more understandable through practical illustrations, such as the 50,000 trees needed for the paper to print the terabyte of information commonly found on individual corporate computers. No wonder, then, that lawyers involved in corporate litigation face enormous challenges when trying to parse a vast corporate ESI collection — comprising tens of thousands www.iltanet.org Risky Business 41 "The practice of law today involves nothing but electronic records. We used to say there's e-discovery as if it was a subset of all discovery. But now there's no other discovery." — Hon. Shira A. Scheindlin Click here for the full podcast on ESIBytes.