E-Discovery: Who Pays The Freight?

Reprinted with permission from FindLaw.com

As litigants are coming to appreciate, electronic discovery is expensive, and indeed so much so, that at times it can be the dog wagging the tail in driving financial decisions when determining the value of a case from a resolution standpoint.

The general rule of thumb in litigation is that parties responding to discovery must incur the costs of that exercise. However, e-discovery opens up new realms of expense, as parties potentially must extract phenomenal quantities of data from myriad sources, such as servers, hard drives, PDAs, backup tapes, etc. Moreover, parties may be asked to change the format of electronic information to be produced.