Items of note from Cisco’s in-house litigation document infrastructure

A previous post admired Cisco’s investment in technology for handling discovery documents (Sept. 21, 2005 about the investment and possibly licensing it). A fuller, very informative description of that company’s efforts appeared in Law.com’s In-House Counsel.

One of the points that struck me was the statement that when electronic discovery workers remove application, help, read me, and log files, that “process can reduce data volume by 70 percent.” I wonder whether the gigabyte statistics for e-discovery that one always reads about include all that useless software accretion.

Also noteworthy was the claim that Cisco, by building its own storage array and other accoutrement of litigation support, effected savings in the first year of operation – compared to bids from several major vendors to deliver substantially the same services and benefits – of a whopping $23 million. Perhaps part of that bounty, or perhaps a separate source of benefit, the law department remarked that it was able to “reduce our costs of discovery by approximately 97 percent” and “the expense of outside legal review by 30 percent.”

Perhaps this opportunity, in its fullest expression, can be seized only by high-tech companies with skads of technical know-how and equipment, but these kinds of savings ought to lure many companies.