E-Discovery – Too Much Information (TMI!)
Electronic discovery or e-discovery is the process of demanding and
sifting through, “digital evidentiary artifacts” for lawsuits.
Information from Facebook, Myspace, chat, email, laptops, smart phones,
memory sticks, back-up tapes, logs from service providers, is now considered,
“fair game,” and subject to inspection when adversaries in lawsuits
demand and are granted access. E-discovery is an increasingly expensive
and Sisyphean reality of modern court proceedings. Court cases
more-frequently face early settlement, plaintiffs are increasingly
unable to sue (or defend), “for fear of [enormous] e-discovery costs”,
and the justice system is increasingly over-burdened.
Ordinary court cases risk millions of dollars, and hours of being
bogged down in e-discovery. As a Verizon attorney explains for his
business, “Almost every case [now] involves e-discovery and spits out
“terabytes” of information…. 200 lawyers can easily review electronic
documents for four months, at a cost of millions of dollars.” As a
result of the increased burden of effort, e-discovery businesses are
booming, frequently charging $125-$600/hr. Annual revenues from
e-discovery businesses, “Have grown from $40m in 1999 to about $2
billion in 2006 and may hit $4 billion next year.”
“Results [of e-discovery] have to be indexed and reviewed by
humans. This usually falls to the junior staff at law firms, some of
whom are so fed up with the drudgery that they have quit the profession
altogether.”
Privacy is increasingly subject to invasion, as insurance
companies have demanded personal records of their clients when
disputing customer claims. For example, in a recent lawsuit, “Horizon
Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey… asked and were granted the
right to see practically everything the teenagers had said on their
Facebook and MySpace profiles, in instant-messaging threads, text
messages, e-mails, blog posts and whatever else the girls might have
done online.”
In this context, it looks like your memex could be your wost enemy!
For more, see the original Economist.com article: The Big Data Dump
This may touch on the following lectures:
ISSUES AND CONTEXTS (9/3)
ORGANIZATION {AND,OR,VS} RETRIEVAL (9/8)
PERSONAL INFORMATION MANAGEMENT (10/20)