In order to analyze the reasons that Lehman Brothers failed in September 2008, Jenner & Block mined the company’s electronically stored information (ESI) containing an estimated three petabytes of data—roughly of 350 billion pages of documents—for relevant issues. That’s 150 times more than all the information in the Library of Congress.

The law firm used electronic review technology to pare down the huge collection. Still, the bill for the page-by-page linear (manual) review of the remaining 40 million pages by 70 contract attorneys at rates averaging $50 per hour came to nearly $6 million, according to Robert Byman, a partner at Jenner. Sifting through all the ESI at the same rates without the initial computer-aided review would have cost a staggering $52.5 billion.

Linear review remains one of the most time-consuming and costly parts of e-discovery. A project consisting of 500 gigabytes of data reviewed by 40 reviewers making 100 document decisions per hour and working 10 hours per day at a rate of $60 per hour may take two months and cost more than $1 million, according to LexisNexis Applied Discovery.

Jack Halprin, vice president of e-discovery and compliance at systems provider Autonomy, claims that computer-aided review can save 75 to 90 percent over similar review done manually.

Nevertheless, many lawyers accustomed to linear review think of it as the “gold standard,” convinced an attorney’s eyes will identify relevant documents and sort out privileged material that a computer will miss. But a recent study reveals that the gold standard is a bit tarnished.

via Computerized E-Discovery Document Review is Accurate and Defensible.