Extract from Cat Casey’s article “Navigating Electronic Discovery in the New Digital Ecosystem”
Since the introduction of the “E” to eDiscovery, there has been a massive transformation in where and how lawyers and legal professionals look for Electronically stored Information (ESI). The eDiscovery process, once rife with banker boxes full of email, expanded dramatically with the advent of the internet and the velocity in development of innumerable data types, size, and formats has not stopped. At the inception of consumer-grade internet, it took minutes to even connect to the internet and most of us old enough to recall at least the mid-90s still hear the crackling sound of a modem connecting.
Now, in a single minute, over 400,000 apps are downloaded, 20 million texts sent, 100’s of millions of emails are sent and over 750,000 hours of Netflix are binge-watched. This volume of creation and consumption has grown dramatically just in the last few years. Netflix’s number of hours watched in a single minute grew by 1000% from 69,444 in 2016 to 764,000 in 2020. So, what is a digital detective to do? Where should law firms, in-house and legal service providers look to uncover potentially relevant ESI?
Navigating the New Data-verse
Savvy legal professionals can no longer focus on the old standby evidence sources of documents, email, text messages and shared drives. If they want to capture the full picture of a custodian’s communication and behavior, they must widen the net to include the new data reshaping the digital dataverse.
