How can you be in two places at the same time? Last week Browning Marean and Tom O’Connor, Senior GGO EDiscovery consultant, along with Bruce Olson, founder and president of ONLAW Trial Technologies, faced this dilemna when they were all speaking on Thursday and Friday at the ABA TechShow in Chicago but scheduled to do the opening keynote session on Thursday at the University of Florida Levin College of Law/ EDRM two-day event, “E-Discovery for the Small and Medium Case.” (Bruce and Tom of course are the authors of Electronic Discovery for Small Cases: Managing Digital Evidence and ESI, published by the ABA’s Law Practice Management section.)
So exactly how did they solve the problem? Well, it’s easy if you’re with Browning Marean and have access to the DLA Piper videoconferencing center! Their presentation was broadcast live from DLA Piper’s offices in Chicago and seen by the live attendees in Gainesville, where George Socha, co-founder of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model and co-chair of the event, acted as moderator. Additionally, the sessions were all streamed live to over 150 Interent attendees.
The topic of the keynote session was “The Six Biggest EDiscovery Blunders” and the focus was on the 97% of cases that are handled by state courts. These cases are often small in claimed value and available resources but can still yield high volumes of ESI. Tom reminded the audience that 1GB of electronic data can yield as much as 75,000 pages of paper and 1TB can equal 75 million pages.
It would take one attorney 375,000 hours to review that much pape. That’s 42 years! To finish the job in one year would require roughly 200 attorneys. That’s clearly too expensive for a case worth no more than $500,000.00 and thus the need for effective low cost technolgy solutions to the ESI crisis.
For a more detailed report, go to the Law Technology News report on the session available at http://tinyurl.com/crcgu2c
