In my previous blog posts How to trim eDiscovery costs part one: laying the groundwork, How to trim eDiscovery costs part two: review fewer documents and review efficiently; How to trim eDiscovery costs part three: leverage technology by adding tools and apps to your review and How to trim eDiscovery costs part four: set your review team up for success; I discussed reducing eDiscovery costs by:

  1. taking the time to set the stage before documents are exchanged
  2. leveraging analytics to send fewer documents to review
  3. adding tools and apps to enhance your review and
  4. managing your review team.

In the next few weeks I will share more of our practical tips in this series of short articles. Here is Part 5 - Archive unnecessary data from your workspace.

Removing data from the active review workspace can significantly reduce your data storage and hosting costs. Data hosting is often billed per gigabyte, therefore, moving unnecessary data offline can generate huge savings to your eDiscovery bill. If you are not ready to delete or archive the data, consider "warm" storage which is often a fraction of the cost of active storage.

1. Remove Junk

If you are processing data, DeNIST the files in processing so that they are not published to the review workspace. DeNISTing is a method of removing file types that are unlikely to have evidentiary value. If you are ingesting data, you can DeNIST and remove junk in your workspace and then delete these files from the active workspace.

2. Remove Duplicates

This is low hanging fruit and can have a significant impact on the size of the database. Before removing duplicates consider whether you can remove duplicates across all custodians or only within each custodian's collection.

3. Warm Storage

Send inactive cases to warm storage. If your case will be inactive for a long period of time, consider sending it to "warm" storage which is less expensive than active storage but allows for a quick transition back to active storage. While warm storage is more costly than cold storage it might be the more economical option after taking into consideration the time and expense of bringing a case back online to active storage from cold storage.

4. Same document in multiple formats

If you have a document that exist in multiple formats for example native and TIFF, consider whether you can delete one of the formats.

5. Document in Multiple Languages

If you have the same document in multiple languages, consider whether you need to keep all of the language versions in active storage.

6. Email Threading

If you have reached agreement in the Discovery Plan to produce only inclusive email, you may want to archive non-inclusive email. Reducing data volume in active storage translates to reduced hosting fees. It is worth taking the time to go over your data to see if there is anything that can be removed from active storage.

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.