eDiscovery’s eVolution Akin To Disney’s Fantasia

Introduction to eDiscovery's eVolution – Past, Present and Future

Three segments of the 1940 Walt Disney classic Fantasia correspond with the three historical phases business information and civil litigation discovery have undergone in the past three-quarters of a century.  Fantasia, an iconic combination of a set of Disney-animated vignettes each set to a well known classical music piece, went into production in 1938.  That same year, the first version of the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure was adopted.

In the now distant past, from 1938 until approximately 1995, business information — and thus lawsuit discovery — entailed an evolving and growing universe, mostly of paper documents.  One of my former Fenwick & West LLP colleagues, J. Carlos Orellana, once pronounced that discovery "document review is the primordial ooze of litigation."  Yet, even as that ooze grew and took over lawsuits, there were outer bounds.  Yet, in the next era, from 1995 to 2011