11/21/2008
E-Discovery: One Year of the Amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure
Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure ("FRCP") regarding electronically stored information ("ESI") took effect on December 1, 2006. Long before those amendments went into effect, however, courts began addressing complex problems regarding the production of ESI. Indeed, the digital age dawned decades ago but has grown exponentially in recent years. According to a report by technology research firm International Data Corporation ("IDC"), the world generated 161 exabytes - each equal to one billion gigabytes - in 2006. By 2007, IDC described the "digital universe" as "2.225x1021 bits (281 exabytes or 281 billion gigabytes)." This dwarfs the five exabytes of data that were created in 2002 according to the widely quoted estimate from the University of California, Berkeley. As described in the Berkeley study, five exabytes is "equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections. Businesses struggle with this explosion of data every day in terms of regulatory compliance, privacy, and retrieval of data necessary to keep enterprises going. For companies involved in litigation, the increase in available ESI also means that a staggering volume of potentially discoverable information may exist.
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