One of the more cringe-inducing questions to hit a practice support person’s e-mail box over the past few years has been: “If I print out this hard-drive, how many pages will that be?”.
Attorneys and paralegals (and really any professional working in the legal field) have always worked in the realm of paper and file folders. Their work-habits and thought processes have been tuned with the tangible, and therefore have a strong need to convert the ethereal bits & bytes of technology into sheets of clean paper. The end-product may not need to be actual paper, but having the conversion ratio allows them to understand the scope of the tasks ahead.
The true answer to the above question is of course: “It depends.” However, being that the true answer will likely not appeal to most attorneys, to follow are some general guidelines on providing a more quantified estimate.
All Estimates Are Rough Estimates: First and foremost, the attorney should be made to understand that any and all estimates we provide will simply be that: an Estimate. There is simply no way (currently) to obtain an accurate DATA to PAGE ratio without doing the actual conversion/printing.
Who & What Are Important Details: Different people or applications will generate different page counts. A much better estimate of the DATA to PAGE ratio can be obtained if you can find out what application and/or department created the data. Was it the Marketing department (meaning more graphic intensive PowerPoint slides, thus a lower MegaByte to Page ratio)? Or did the data come from Word Processing (where each file may be a hundred page Word document)? The table below shows some page to document and gigabyte estimates which can give you a starting point:
Skip What Can Be Skipped: Not everything needs to be processed. In most cases the relevant material are just your basic MS Office documents. Program and system files which do not affect the litigation or deal should be eliminated from your estimates. Get more details from the attorney as he or she may not be aware that out of the entire 80 Gig hard drive just handed to you, perhaps only 5 Gigs are worth reviewing.
But, above all else, seek advice. Getting the DATA to PAGE conversion ratio is just the tip of the iceberg. Electronic Discovery as a whole has now become a necessity rather than a convenience. While electronic data was less than 20% of most litigations just a few years ago, that trend is now reversed with electronic files comprising 80% of the data that needs to be reviewed by an attorney. That means pitfalls abound. Protecting the forensic integrity of the data, keeping the chain of custody, mining relevant meta-data fields, and even the credentials of potential witnesses who’ve handled the data are important areas which can make or break a case/deal. Electronic data is here to stay, and dealing with them from a legal standpoint has become the life blood of litigation.
Article by Andrew P. Li
Mr. Li is a Litigation Support and E-Discovery trainer and consultant with over a decade of experience. He is the owner of APLCS, LLC (http://www.aplcs.com) and can be reached at requests@aplcs.com
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