Extract from Doug Austin’s article “Don’t “LEGO” of Your Creativity When Building an eDiscovery Solution”
Like many boys over the past several decades, I played with LEGOs when I was a kid. Back then, you didn’t buy a kit that was designed to build a specific item, you bought a box of LEGO building blocks in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors with no instructions. You could build whatever you wanted, how ever you wanted to build it – the possibilities were endless, and you could be as creative as you wanted to be.
Unfortunately, those LEGO boxes didn’t sell well, so the company began selling kits, designed to build specific items – everything from a fire truck to the Star Wars Death Star to the Batmobile. And they came with instructions.
eDiscovery No Longer Fits a Set of Instructions
Many eDiscovery professionals want to make eDiscovery conform to a “set of instructions” – they want predictability. They want to conduct eDiscovery the way they’ve always done it. They want to stick to discovery of email and office documents and avoid considering discovery of ESI sources like mobile device data, collaboration app data, audio and video files and more. They want to haggle over the scope of search terms with opposing parties instead of considering leveraging technological approaches such as Technology Assisted Review (TAR). They want a predictable outcome.
