Extract from Akshita Singhal & Lianna Vaughan’s article “The Evolution of eDiscovery”
Since its inception in 2005, eDiscovery has taken on many forms—evolving with us to keep up with the colossal data demands of today. Even so, many law firms, corporations, service providers, and government agencies have not moved on from using the time-consuming and labor-intensive traditional, legacy eDiscovery tools of yesterday.
Some of these tools include spreadsheets, database management systems, cloud storage platforms, and paper management systems.
Let’s take a closer look at how these four traditional tools measure up to modern eDiscovery solutions.
- Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets are one of the most common ways organizations manage their eDiscovery. This comes as no surprise, as spreadsheets are very affordable, easy to learn, can be exported for simple data visualization, and easily shared for rapid analysis.
However, all information—including electronically stored information (ESI)—has to be manually entered and updated cell by cell. This is an incredibly tedious process that is very prone to data entry errors and is quickly becoming an impractical practice with the current, vast growth of data volumes.
