I have been working on a fraudulent conveyance litigation for the past two months. One of the issues we have been facing is collecting documents to respond to a discovery request. This has involved both paper and electronic documents.
I have worked on some extremely large document cases (over 2,000 boxes) before, but I am experiencing first-hand what I wrote about in my "Budget Development for Litigators" CLE presentation. That is, the explosion in electronic data. In 2003, the average businessperson had 1 GB of files (equivalent to 25-30 boxes of documents) and that has grown in 2005 to 4GB. This, in turn, has driven up the costs of e-discovery.
I came across an article today from The Corporate Counsellor titled, "Electronic Discovery: Avoiding the Costs" authored by Timothy Q. Delaney of Brinks Hofer Gilson & Lione.
The article cites cases where restoring and producing emails in a format acceptable for discovery was estimated at $6 million and almost $10 million.
A 1998 case involving Procter & Gamble is cited where P&G was sanctioned for $10,000 for knowingly deleting relevant e-mail. While the plaintiff spent almost $60,000 recovering and producing electronic files, which the court refused to require P&G to pay.
In early 2002, a New York district court established an eight-factor test to evaluate the reasonableness of shifting the costs of discovery. See Mr. Delaney's article for a detailed discussion of each of these factors.
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