Costly Discovery Decisions Can Include Choice of Counsel
A recent e-discovery decision out of Minnesota federal district court (the Zurn Pex plumbing products litigation) reminded me of the high stakes involved in cases dependent upon electronic information. The staggering cost of discovery of electronic information can alter the entire economic balance of a lawsuit.
Plaintiffs request roughly 361 gigabytes of data. . . . Zurn represents that by using the generally accepted standard of 75,000 pages per gigabyte, Plaintiffs’ request amounts to nearly 27 million pages of documents. . . . If the K drive were not searched, the remaining data consists of 48 gigabytes. Zurn also states that a search of the custodians’ emails and J drive files will require approximately seventeen weeks and cost $1,150,000, exclusive of vendor collection and processing costs, to review and process the data.
A couple other issues of note — the court mentions that counsel worked through discovery “amicably.” It’s a sign of the declining level of professionalism in law practice when counsel who work amicably together are sufficiently anomolous to warrant comment.
For clients, this decision provides something for you to consider. Counsel who fight bitterly with opposing lawyers, while sometimes scratching an emotional itch on the part of the client, often succeed only in increasing the cost and length of litigation. Professionalism and civility can make a distasteful event like a lawsuit a little less distasteful. And as this decision proves, having counsel that are reasonable can, in the end, save millions in discovery and motion costs.
