The current issue of the ACC Docket contains an 11-page article, “Ethics and Ediscovery Review,” by Patrick Oot, Anne Kershaw and me. The article discusses the economic and ethical consequences of what might hitherto have been dismissed as an obscure technical point by many senior trial lawyers: the difference between consolidating duplicate electronic records just within the records of a single custodian versus consolidating duplicates across all custodians. The article is based on a survey of leading e-discovery providers that showed that consolidating duplicate electronic records across custodians results in, on average, a reduction of the volume of e-discovery by 38% vs. only 21% for within-custodian deduping. Assuming review costs are proportional to volume, that means that a firm that doesn’t use across-custodian deduping will bill, on average, 27% more than necessary for reviewing e-discovery prior to production. More...