Manual ICP is a slow process that increases information risk and can lead to under collection, late collection, and spoliation. On the other hand, automatic collection can enable ECA, fast collection, and Matter-based ICP. There is no question that automated collection holds advantages over manual ICP. Given the risks associated with Manual ICP, the courts and industry thought leaders are correct to ask if manual collections are still relevant and defensible.
Now, there is no doubt that manual collection for eDiscovery is slow and unwieldy. eDiscovery 2.0 concedes the point here, yet they rage on:
While there’s no dispute that the “automated” collection methods available in litigation software referenced above have a number of features that make this approach more efficient, the question is whether a “manual” (i.e., custodian based) collection process is somehow less defensible. If this is truly the case, then many midsized companies without the budget to purchase such e-discovery applications will inherently be found deficient – which is a daunting notion.
There is clearly a fundamental misunderstanding here. Mid-sized companies, with their mid-sized amount of employees will pay mid-sized licensing fees for automated collection, eDiscovery and records management software. The proportion they pay scales linearly (both up and down) with the size of their company.
And the pricing tangent misses the point entirely, which is that a combination of automatic and manual collection will be the most thorough method of eDiscovery. Having the ability to automatically collect documents will be necessary in the near future (if not right now). Without enterprise-wide search and automatic collection, it is like searching the web without Google. Instead, with only manual collection, you would be starting at a website and clicking link to link or typing in random URLs until you find the right site. How thorough is that?
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