Comments on: I Hate That We’re Still Talking About Pages

By: Craig Ball

Craig Ball — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 04:30:19 +0000

Bravo, Mike! Page equivalencies are fanciful. So, why rely on calculators? Instead, just tell lawyers that the data volume equals enough pages to circle the globe six times. Just as accurate, but more entertaining.

By: Mike McBride

Mike McBride — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:55:36 +0000

Bob, I agree you need to be able to walk between worlds, and translate for those folks, but really, isn’t expecting to still work in the “boxes, post-its and binders” world a sure sign that maybe it’s getting close to the time where you need to do something else for a living? When I can store 3TB of data on an external drive that costs $250, trying to deal with discovery using those tools is a bit like painting the Empire State building with an ink pen.

By: bob cobb

bob cobb — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:29:08 +0000

paper model is still relavent and has to be taken into account when you are trying to make an attorney understand what they’re dealing with. Certainly, partners schooled in the world of boxes, post-it’s, and binders still expect to work in that manner to some degree. And it helps to get them absorb the facts when you describe things like possibly “thousands of banker’s boxes”. Information that could be used in talks regarding settlement and meet/confers.

If you work in the field, especially at a lawfirm, you need to be able to move between the worlds. Getting agitated about it is really nothing more than myopic and masochistic.

By: Mike McBride

Mike McBride — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:21:22 +0000

I get that, and it makes sense, but here’s the problem with that. As more and more of the data you need to review exists in databases, or web 2.0 interfaces, the idea of “pages” becomes somewhat pointless. Anything other than email or word processing documents don’t really have pages. Right now, those are the bulk of the documents you’d review, but they aren’t everything and once you get into something like an Access or Oracle db, a Twitter/Facebook stream, or audio and video, this metaphor of the printed page starts to really fall down. Once it does, all those attorney’s who only visualize ediscovery through that metaphor are going to have a hard time comprehending what they have. To use your example, how do you estimate the time length of a review that includes running searches against databases, or carefully listening to audio/video files? It’s a different ballgame as the technology people use changes.

We’re moving toward a point where you can’t accurately give a “number of pages” comparison for much of the data that may be relevant to litigation, what do we do then to describe the scope of a review?

By: scj

scj — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:05:07 +0000

In my view, it’s often easier to estimate the length of time necessary to perform a privilege/responsiveness review when speaking in terms of documents or pages than GBs or TBs. So, to me at least, pages remain quite relevant.