e-Discovery is an increasingly popular process in law. This article explains just some of the advantages, benefits and reasons why lawyers need to know about e-discovery.

Many lawyers have little interest in learning about electronic discovery (often referred to as e-discovery for short). However, in an increasingly digital world in which most all professions have adapted to meet this trend, electronic discovery offers a number of advantages. In most cases, the discovery phase is the most time consuming and costly stage of a lawsuit. Today, most business documents and communications are digital. Adapting to meet this trend is unavoidable; e-discovery can add a lot of value for the client.

Traditional legal discovery entailed lawyers and attorneys sorting through a pile of document by hand. With the amount of data growing and growing, a physical stack of documents is becoming simply too much for lawyers to process. E-discovery allows for lawyers to search through only relevant documents, a tremendous advantage when dealing with giant amounts of Electronically Stored Information (ESI). 

First, integrating e-discovery can offer excellent cost savings. Time that would have been sent sifting through piles of papers is now reduced dramatically. This savings is better for everyone: billable hours are reduced for the client, and lawyers are able to work on more cases. Second, the quality of the presentation and production of the documents is superior. Some e-discovery systems allow lawyers to search for only the relevant terms also identifying and grouping together other relevant documents, even if they do not contain the same searched words or phrases. This means the discovery process is dynamic and weights the most important information appropriately. Third, electronic discovery creates special challenges to prevent spoliation. Spoliation is the intentional withholding, hiding, altering, or destroying of evidence relevant to a legal proceeding. Because e-discovery is an electronic process, it is possible to build in automated systems for tracking every document, making spoliation more difficult, and therefore increasing the quality of the legal proceedings.

While lawyers and attorneys used to spend hours sifting through piles during the document review process, e-discovery reduces the time spent dramatically. It also lessens the costs, improves the quality of the evidence discovered and provides for a more effective presentation. Many lawyers may think that e-discovery is unnecessary technology, but the advantages provided by it are simply too great to ignore.

Related posts

• No related posts.