Extract from Casey Sullivan’s article “Reducing Discovery’s Burdens: Technology Alone Is Not Enough”
Three decades ago, the discovery process was fairly straight forward. An attorney conducting document discovery could simply confer with her client, determine the documents at issue, collect them from filing cabinets, and begin reviewing. The relative dearth of paper documents meant that even inefficient approaches to document review, such as linear, eyes-on review of each and every document, typically weren’t too burdensome. And they were, at least, reasonably intuitive.
Then the personal computer ushered in the digital age—and the massive proliferation in electronically stored information which, even as early as the 1970s, was making its way into litigation. (The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were amended to reference electronic data in 1970, for example.)
