The term “scalability” has become one of the most widespread ideas commonly associated with ediscovery software. Scalability and effective ediscovery go hand in hand in some of the online resources you find on the internet today, but there are few people who really know what it means.

So, in order to better understand this term, let us first define “scalability.” Scalability is defined as the ability to adapt to increased demands. When used alongside ediscovery software, it is the ability of the software or program to adapt to the increased demands of processing data, thereby retaining the ability to come up with relevant, accurate information to be used as evidence no matter how much data actually accumulates. Effective ediscovery software should be able to meet the increased demand or load for clients while producing the same quality results. It should be able to adapt to small or large scale legal cases, and treat each case with accurate, consistent speeds and processing.

To better understand the concept of scalability in ediscovery, here is an example:

A company is being sued for poor customer service and has to come up with good evidence within a day to win the case. The company currently has 50 employees working for them and an initial estimate of 500 gigabytes of information would have to be retrieved and sorted out by ediscovery software to find relevant information for the civil lawsuit. The initial assessment done by providers would take a day to process and analyze. This is actually good for the company, because it gives them enough time to submit their evidence in court. Now, let’s say that, during the retrieval process, they find that several files were compressed, and upon expanding those files, the total information that would have to be processed and analyzed would reach 1 terabyte. If the ediscovery software being used does not possess scalability, this could mean disaster for that company. The number of days to process the sudden increase in volume of data would double and that company would have no time to submit their evidences. Plus, vendors of ediscovery with no scalability would charge extra for the increase in volume of the data. This scenario would be a losing legal battle if the company had used a system that can’t adapt to sudden but necessary increased demands. Read the rest of this entry »