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Consider this simple fact: because of the way duplicate electronic documents are handled (or, more appropriately, mishandled), clients overpaid or grossly overpaid for their documents review nearly half of all productions.  This comes from a survey that is discussed at length in a terrific article, Ethics and Ediscovery Review, published in the ACC Docket.  The article is authored by Patrick Oot, Anne Kershaw and Joe Howie. 

 

Some lawyers agree to have each person's email "de-duped," but do not have the entire population of documents "de-duped."  This means that each person on an email will have one copy of that email in his or her population of documents.  Multiply that by scores of people and thousands of emails and pretty soon you're talking about real money.

 

The authors discuss this from the point of view of lawyers' ethical obligations.  I invite you to think about this from the standpoint of efficiency.  Are you more or less likely to experience this problem with lawyers working on a value fee or by the hour? 

 

The ways, whether intentional or utterly inadvertent, that clients lose while lawyers win, and many and varied, and frequently not even on an in-house lawyer's radar screen, particularly in companies that do not have the litigation bandwidth to have an in-house lawyer specializing in the nuances of electronic discovery.

 

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