E-Discovery for Everybody: Craig Ball and the EDna Challenge

As recently highlighted by Sharon Nelson on her excellent blog Ride the Lightening one of the things Craig Ball most enjoys is coming up with a challenging e-discovery hypothetical and then confounding some of his fellow luminaries in the EDD world.  For Sharon’s full post click here.

The Edna challenge involves an old school chum who runs a small law firm. She wants to conduct an in-house review of ESI in a fairly small case. Craig outlines the facts, the technology available and the budget and then asks “How Should Edna proceed?”  Sharon’s post has a link to the challenge.

Craig addresses a key point in the e-discovery world.  As he says “a hurdle [for most] is the unavailability and high cost of specialized software to process and review electronic evidence”.   What Craig does through his article/challenge is explore affordable, off-the-shelf ways to get where you need to go in e-discovery.  As Craig says, few cases involve millions of files. Most entail review of material collected from a handful of custodians in familiar productivity formats like Outlook e-mail, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.

Craig concluding point:  vendors have not yet built a proper tool for those who need to perform “do it yourself” ESI review.  Why are they ignoring 85% of the market?

It’s a great piece and (as always) from a Craig Ball article you learn a lot about e-discovery.