I have long argued that deploying armies of domestic contract lawyers to review documents in e-discovery is not a sustainable practice.
Search Software Gets Boost From New Rules in the Wall Street Journal (5/16/07) explains that the December 2006 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are driving new corporate spending on e-discovery software and services.
The article quotes a Gartner Group analyst: “Electronic-discovery software eliminates the need to have lawyers conduct extensive data reviews.” Really? Can we send home the thousands of contract lawyers reviewing documents at this very moment? I think not. Perhaps this quote was taken out of context, but even with foreseeable software advances, lawyers will still spend much time reviewing documents. (I’ll avoid semantics over what “extensive” means.)
In my opinion, the WSJ is the best newspaper in the US. So it disturbs me to read an article about a market I know well and see what I consider significant inaccuracies. We have to evaluate information on web sites and blogs carefully; it turns out the same is true for mainstream media (MSM).