Page 2 - EDiscovery

S2 | MONDAY, MARCH 16, 2015 | E-Discovery
| NYLJ.COM

BY CHRIS O’REILLY
AND DAN MEYERS
E
mails often comprise the bulk of the digi-
tal documents involved in the e-discov-
ery process of corporate litigation cases.
Depending on the case there could be 100,000,
500,000 or one million emails, perhaps from
around the world, involved at the outset. The

task at hand is to electronically gather them
together and identify only those that should
actually be reviewed by an attorney because
they may be relevant to the case.
This may seem like a daunting task, but
with the availability of modern technology to
gather emails and email threading software
to organize them, it need not be.

In order to gain a grasp of the scope and
potential cost of an email discovery project
containing a large number of emails, it helps
to reduce the sheer volume of emails to a
common denominator. Digital documents like
emails are measured in gigabytes, a term with
which many people, including attorneys, may
not be totally familiar.
For perspective, it may help to compare

gigabytes to other commonly used measure-
ments. The real estate world thinks in terms
of square feet. Farmers plant crops based on
anticipated price per bushel. Fuel eficiency is
measured as miles per gallon. Gigabytes are
no different. A single byte is equal to one char-
acter of written digital text. A typical word is
How Do You Handle
10 characters, or 10 bytes. A gigabyte then is
1 billion bytes, which is roughly equal to the

number of individual characters in a pickup
500 Truckloads of Emails?
truck full of books. So, 500 gigabytes of emails
would, if printed, ill 500 pickup trucks.

Capturing Designated Emails

To get this aspect of the e-discovery pro-
cess started, unaltered copies of the initial
Threading boosts eiciency and savings.
truckloads of emails must be captured. To
accomplish this, a law irm or corporate legal
department can choose to retain an e-discov-
ery provider with technology to forensically
copy, collect and store the emails. However,
if they have the technical ability, they could

CHRIS O’REILLY is the CEO of LDM Global, an interna-
tional e-discovery provider. DAN MEYERS is a partner
at Bracewell & Giuliani in New York.
CK
TO
BIGS

Inside
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BY JOSEPH FRANCOEUR
BY DAVID J. KESSLER,
BY BARRY KAZAN
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AND MARK NOEL
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AND ALEX ALTMAN
Agnieszka Czuj, Design
S

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