Cohen Discusses the Future of eDiscovery with CDR

Winston & Strawn director of eDiscovery Support Services Scott Cohen were quoted in the article “Preparing for eDiscovery in the Age of Big Data” in Commercial Dispute Resolution’s July-August 2013 issue. The article discusses the ever-growing amount of data being produced today and its effect on the evolving eDiscovery process. With the increasing affordability of data storage, the value of storing massive amounts of data has become greater than the cost of storage. And, along with the U.S. government, corporations have begun taking advantage.

As the article describes, a slightly larger investment can buy lots more storage space, and that space can be used to store seemingly insignificant data from which one little detail may just determine the result of a bet-the-company litigation. However, the more data companies store, the more expensive eDiscovery can become.

With so much data available today, not only are discovery costs ballooning, but cases with complex eDiscovery phases are often bogged down. However, recent “predictive coding” technology has been designed to process large volumes of documents through complex software algorithms with the intent of prioritizing relevant documents for review, expediting the document review process. Of course, relying on this new, developing technology has its risks.

“The train has left the station, and it’s now up to the purveyors of predictive coding tools to prove that the risks one would naturally assume to be involved in a computer making decisions for a human being are as low as they claim them to be.”