Non-Litigation Support Deduping

By Joe Howie

There are at least three reasons why this is important to those who toil in litigation support: The first is that as deduping strategies become more popular within different enterprises, litigation support personnel will increasingly encounter such systems and will need to know what special challenges or opportunities they may present.

The second is that due to their experience in processing and managing large volumes of e-Discovery and other data, litigation support professionals are often called upon to advise about or manage in-house content, and deduplication of multiple copies of the same files can have a profound impact on the resources needed to manage a firm’s data. For example, one article cites Forrester Research as saying that a company could reasonably expect to see a 10:1 reduction in volume through duplicate consolidation. See http://searchcio.techtarget.com.au/articles/25817-CIOs-beware-claims-of-disk-deduplication-savings

Of course, this is just a guideline, individual savings can vary and it’s possible that some companies won’t see any savings — just like in litigation support collections.

The third reason that litigation support professionals ought to be concerned about this general business trend is that business people are catching on to the tremendous savings that can be achieved in the use of deduplication for their own business records and will increasingly expect their law firms to be using comparable technology — especially when the failure to consolidate duplicates can result in greatly increased legal review and other costs such as storage and print-to-tif or pdf, to say nothing of the increased litigation risks posed by failing to dedupe properly.

This article appeared originally in the October 2009 ALSP Update, the monthly publication of the Association of Litigation Support Professionals and is reprinted with permission. Read more about this nonprofit membership organization at www.alsponline.org.