What's in a million?
A million documents, that is. A colossal amount of words, for one. For most Indian corporations, it still means some serious IT effort implementing "Knowledge Management" solutions. For us lowly users, our 4 GB Microsoft Outlook PST contains a piffling 50,000 documents, and our desktop maybe a couple of thousand more. Of course, a million documents means some trivial fraction of a percentage point of Google's overall crawl. But in the corporation, it still appears to be... weighty, doesn't it?
Not if you ask a legal technology company, not any more. Apparently, that's a couple of days' output for these companies - on a single project at that. Some of the large players in the space - Kroll, Attenex, Stratify, Applied Discovery - have reportedly handled in excess of 20 million individual documents in a single project. According to them, this number constitutes a small fraction of the actual electronic data present in any mid-sized corporation. One executive drew attention to a recent ruling against Morgan Stanley, where the judge ruled that the corporation had wantonly done an incomplete job of locating and restoring critical historical email data. The corporation's attempted defense was that it had been unable to sift through the tens of thousands of backup tapes located in multiple warehouses. In document terms, this translates to a few hundred billion individual documents.
How, then, does one deal with a million documents? Some legal discovery surveys report that the average contract attorney (a document review expert hired for first-cut review at an average of $100 an hour) chews through 500-800 documents on a given day. That translates to close to $1,000,000 merely for the review work, notwithstanding the software and infrastructure expenses to facilitate this review. This is clearly a very expensive proposition.
In recent years, legal technology companies like Zantaz, Attenex and Stratify have each tried to bring their own approach to the problem. Zantaz, recently acquired by Autonomy, now claims to leverage Autonomy's content management capabilities along with its visualization offerings. Stratify attacks the problem using its clustering technology, where documents self-organize themselves into topical "clusters". Attenex permits the creation of "pattern rules", thus getting documents to group together based on their content.
Certainly, more companies will approach legal discovery in different ways in coming days. But given the vast volumes of electronic content being generated in more and more corporations, the thrust will shift from pure scale to facilitating more efficient ways to deal with the content storm. Already, companies with intelligent technology are fast becoming bigger players in the space. With the LPO industry gaining momentum in India, we may very well see various pieces of the legal discovery pie being cooked in this country.
