As Bulging Client Data Heads for the Cloud, Law Firms Ready for a Storm
Matthew Knouff: “Backing up your data should not be viewed as a best practice, but as a requirement.” Photo by Sara Stathas
Perhaps no case could be a more monumental example of the reality of modern e-discovery than the ongoing Viacom copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube filed back in 2008. In that dispute, the judge ordered that 12 terabytes of data be turned over, according to Matthew Knouff.
“People often say that one terabyte equals 50,000 trees, and 10 terabytes would be the equivalent of all the printed collections of the Library of Congress,” says Knouff, who is general counsel of Complete Discovery Source, a New York City-based electronic discovery services provider. For the Viacom/YouTube case then, the demand was for the printed equivalent of the entire Library of Congress. And then some.
Experiences like these have left law firms and in-house attorneys scrambling to make sense of the new risks associated with the seemingly endless data produced by emerging technologies like cloud computing and social media—first as a way to get their own house in order and second as a sorely needed service for the vulnerable corporations employing them.
Last year a study by the Deloitte Forensic Center—a think tank that explores ways to mitigate the effects of illegal and unethical business practices—found plenty of concern over corporations’ ability to handle the e-discovery demands of social media. (See “More Discovery Woes from Web 2.0.”)
Even more disturbing was Deloitte’s finding that only 9 percent of businesses surveyed believed they were well-prepared to electronically capture and store digital information generated on cloud computing programs or on software-as-a-service applications such as those found at Salesforce.com.
Meanwhile new technologies are forcing law firms to wrestle with previously unimagined concerns, including improbable imponderables such as: “If someone sends a disappearing e-mail and no one reads it, have any codes of ethics been violated?”
Essentially, technology’s inexorable drive to permeate every pore of our existence in ever more complex, far-reaching ways seems destined—at least to some who follow e-discovery most closely—to forever change the nature of the law.
Click to continue reading “The Trouble with Terabytes” from the April issue of the ABA Journal.
