Sampling: Making Electronic Discovery More Cost Effective

With the huge volumes of electronic data subject to discovery in virtually every instance of litigation, time and costs of conducting discovery have become exceedingly important when litigants plan their discovery strategies. Rather than incurring the costs of having lawyers review every document produced in response to a discovery request in search of relevant evidence, a cost effective strategy for document review planning is to use statistical sampling of the database of documents to determine the likelihood of finding relevant evidence by reviewing additional documents. This paper reviews and discusses how sampling can be used to make document review more cost effective by considering issues such as an appropriate sample size, how to develop a sampling strategy, and taking into account the potential value of the litigation in relation to the costs of additional discovery efforts.