Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/45522
"Leading jurists are urging law schools to close the gaps in their offerings." of terabytes on servers and workstations within the company, as well as similar or larger amounts of ESI in the company's custody and control that are outside the company's walls — into the "vital few" (relatively speaking) dozens of gigabytes relevant to a particular matter. Identifying a reasonable initial set of relevant electronic information — to first, preserve it (as potential evidence) and later, cull out the nonrelevant, nonprivileged ESI through analysis and legal review — in a typical corporate environment places the litigator squarely in front of the problem of ESI volume. MANAGING THE MANAGEMENT OF ESI Unfortunately, the pure volume of ESI is often just the first (and frequently, less troublesome) issue in the process of managing a corporate litigant's electronic evidence. The complexity and variety of ways that ESI is managed — that is, how it is created, shared, duplicated, distributed, stored, modified and deleted, 42 Risky Business ILTA White Paper and by whom — are almost always extensive and (with the exception of the ESI subset actually controlled and stewarded by the IT organization) undocumented. Individuals with identical jobs and access to the same information frequently manage ESI in different ways. For instance, consider two engineers whose highly technical designs are commingled in a company's next market-busting product: one who scrupulously deletes every obsolete drawing and specification as the design evolves, while the other hoards the sequence of product versions for potential reuse in future projects. This is a common scenario in most large companies, where the ESI is "managed" by an individual or group based on preference, level of experience, familiarity with toolsets and techniques from prior projects (or jobs) and a host of other factors. It is common for "knowledge workers," such as engineers and financial analysts, to be custodians of the crucial ESI that is relevant to complex litigation.