Good interview on early case assessment with Benton Armstrong and Andy Ruckman of Deloitte.

From Metropolitan Corporate Counsel:

Editor: Tell us about the costly results of the repeated export of information in conventional e-discovery systems.

Armstrong/Ruckman: The volume and complexity of electronic data that is being stored presents challenges and great opportunities to reduce e-discovery costs and to mine that data for valuable business information. Today conventional e-discovery systems often require collecting large volumes of data from data stores throughout the organization for export and processing. The costs can be immense – one of our clients had hundreds of thousands of SharePoint sites within its organization. When they did a collection that touched a given department, they felt compelled to pull data from every SharePoint site to which anybody in that department had access. On a recurring basis, they were collecting enormous amounts of data for culling and review, knowing full well that the vast majority of it would not be relevant to the matter on which they were working, but they were still having to either handle that data internally or pay an external vendor to do so…

…Editor: What is the role of an ECA tool?

Armstrong/Ruckman: ECA tools can reduce the spend on review by greatly reducing the number of documents that make it through to the attorney-review phase. Let me give you an example. Traditionally in e-discovery, we might have 100,000 documents of which 20,000 end up being responsive, and we have to review all 100,000 of those. With our ECA tool we might reduce to 40,000 the documents that need to be reviewed and only 20,000 of them are responsive, so we might be able, using ECA, to cull out about 60 percent of the documents you would traditionally have to review…