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The Old Ways - A Brief History of Electronic Discovery
Personal Computer | Scanning & Coding | Good News & Bad News In the old days of document review, all business documents had the same "format"—that is, paper. It didn't matter if the document was a ledger sheet, a marketing plan, or an engineering drawing; it was created and stored on paper. When litigation or antitrust investigations occurred, attorneys simply looked through filing cabinets and read paper documents. Tedious, but simple. Then came the personal computer. Suddenly, a document was no longer a document. Ledger sheets were created with spreadsheet software such as Lotus 1-2-3, or Microsoft Excel. Memos were created with word processing software such as WordPerfect, or Microsoft Word. Tied to the definition of a document was the concept of a "file format." Excel documents could only be opened using Excel. And Word documents required Word to be read. And so on. Creating documents got simpler, but reviewing them in discovery became more complicated. In the mid-1980s, when electronic documents were still far outnumbered by paper, legal professionals devised a simple solution for dealing with electronic documents—print them. By printing the electronic documents and adding them to the paper production, all documents had the same "format." This approach made perfect sense as long as paper documents outnumbered electronic documents. Then came scanning and coding. By the early 1990s, the personal computer had found its way onto most desktops in corporate America. Electronic documents began to outnumber paper documents and the once popular IBM Selectric typewriter became a thing of the past. Faced with an even split between paper and electronic documents, legal professionals invented the so-called "scanning and coding" practice. Scanning and coding was the legal industry's first attempt to use the power of personal computers in the discovery process. The practice of scanning and coding starts with converting all documents into the same format (the lowest common denominator-paper), and then scanning to a PDF or TIFF image format. The document is then put through the "OCR" (Optical Character Recognition) process, which reads printed words as electronic text. This text is then loaded into a database for keyword searching. While OCR technology represented a big advancement in the discovery process, it has significant limitations. For example, it doesn't really work with numerical information (e.g. spreadsheets) and is only about 85 percent accurate in converting printed words to electronic text. Worse yet, critical information about the electronic document—the so-called "meta data"—is lost when the electronic file is reduced to paper. (Meta data reveals information such as author, document creation date, date last saved, printed, edited, etc.) Only a subset of the printed words survives in the electronic-to-paper-to-electronic translation. To mitigate the loss of meta data, the "coding" part of the process was invented. To understand the coding process, imagine a room full of minimum wage contractors entering searchable "fields" of information into just-scanned text files. These fields are derived from the original paper document, and typically include the author, subject, date, and select document recipients. Most meta data, such as date of last modification, or bcc recipients, cannot be salvaged once the electronic file is reduced to paper. And for the subset of meta data that can be restored, the integrity of the coding process assumes no human error—a big assumption. The good news and the bad news. Despite its shortcomings, the scanning and coding process results in a database of searchable text, and enables relevant documents to be found with a simple database query. The good news is that scanning and coding was the first significant advance in solving the proverbial "needle in a haystack" problem. The bad news is that it costs more than $1/page to scan and code the documents in the first place—500 percent more expensive than true electronic discovery! The practice of scanning and coding is still used today. It made sense in its day, but now, when virtually 100 percent of all new documents are created and stored electronically, does it really make sense to take electronic documents, reduce them to paper, and then spend $1/page restoring them to electronic form? We don't think so. Discover A Better Way® Times have changed. Your practice has changed. And you're ready to Discover A Better Way®. To join the other lawyers who've mastered electronic discovery with our help, contact us by phone or email. Contact Us Call 877.613.3010, or email new_clients@applieddiscovery.com to get in touch with your local Electronic Discovery Specialist. |
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