10GB of e-mail could cost you $1M

The growing number of e-discovery requests associated with the recently updated Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) is forcing companies to look for ways to automate their e-discovery process.

Manual electronic data discoveries are often cost-prohibitive. Steven Whetstone, Stratify's vice president of client strategy and development, says it can cost $50,000 for an attorney to manually review a single gigabyte of data. So if an organization needs 10GB of e-mail reviewed, costs could reach as high as $1 million. Reducing these costs requires companies to take steps to minimize the number of e-mails that need the attention of individual reviewers.

Unfortunately, no electronic data discovery silver bullet exists and companies may need a two-step process to bring the number of e-mails needing review down to a manageable size. Step one typically calls for software like that from Attenex, Metalincs or Clearwell Systems that can cull down large sets of e-mails to smaller, more relevant subsets by identifying duplicate e-mails. In one case that was verified by the Enterprise Strategy Group, a Clearwell customer saved $180,000 by reducing the number of e-mails needing legal review from 96GB to 16GB.