The E-Discovery Revolution – The Who Part 3
By Nancy Patton
If you've been following my recent blog posts, you know I have a couple of themes going. First, we are in the middle of a revolution of sorts – an e-discovery revolution. It's fun, chaotic, exhilarating, and exhausting … but we love it! Second, I am focusing on the Who, What, Where, Why and When of the revolution. This will be my final post on the “Who" as an aspect of what we are in the midst of. By now, you've hopefully begun the process of cultivating the cross-functional team relationships... Read More
My recommended action in my last post was for the Legal E-Discovery Expert to go make friends with the IT E-Discovery Manager or Specialist in order to better understand where the data is throughout the organization. If you have not already done that, please make that a priority this week. This is critical, and here is why. When we think about the people who are involved in the task of identifying, assessing, collecting, reviewing and producing data (we'll call this “data management"), there's someone from Legal, someone from IT who has... 
It was not terribly long ago that electronically stored information (ESI) collection and subsequent review looked a lot like this: gather up printed emails, scan them into the system with optical character recognition (OCR) set to “on," and through a rudimentary set of search tools, try to find responsive content. Or, perhaps those “paper emails" showed up in a big binder and the task was to flip through one-by-one, classifying the item, its keywords, and potential relevance in an accompanying spreadsheet which would then be turned over to a supervising attorney... 
If you read my May blog post, you'll understand that my general perspective is that we are in the midst of something so young and with so much evolution yet to go, that it's a revolution of sorts…an E-Discovery Revolution! Revolutions are scary, chaotic, satisfying, and challenging. We often don't have answers and we are making things up. We are making pretty good guesses and trying to follow evolving rules, recommendations and best practices…but we don't really know if it's exactly right. Any of this sound like you? In my coming... 
It's not uncommon when I tell people about what I do and the world of e-discovery we are immersed in (and by “we" I mean you, me, and everyone else who is in this slightly crazy legal specialty!) that I compare it to the industrial revolution. Hmmmm, I wonder if “E-Discovery Revolution" will someday catch on for what we are in the middle of!?!!? Historians mark the industrial revolution occurring between 1820 and 1870. It spanned over 50 years. Imagine all that was learned during that time about machines and people... 
I am the newest contributor to Exterro's E-Discovery and Information Governance Blog. I am a Senior Solutions Consultant for Exterro and hope to bring a unique perspective to the content on our blog. I've been involved in some facet of E-Discovery for about eight years and during my almost three years at Exterro, I've seen a lot, heard a lot, resolved a lot, and run around…a lot. Prior to my role as Solutions Consultant, I was a member of Exterro's Client Success Project Management team. In this role, I helped guide...