With the majority
of the world speaking something OTHER than
English it is important that the process of
evaluating electronic discovery in a case (early
case assessment) take into account languages
into the data collection, preservation,
analysis, filtering, culling, processing,
reviewing….
As the world
becomes a smaller business community because of
technology and communications so does the demand
that multilingual ESI will place on litigators,
attorneys and the courts.
For instance
the most common languages today are (and the #
of people speaking that language):
Chinese*
(937,132,000)
Spanish
(332,000,000)
English
(322,000,000)
Bengali
(189,000,000)
Hindi/Urdu
(182,000,000)
Arabic*
(174,950,000)
Portuguese
(170,000,000)
Russian
(170,000,000)
Japanese
(125,000,000)
German
(98,000,000)
French*
(79,572,000)
Now think about
the impact on collecting, preserving, filtering,
searching, culling….. gets pretty intense
quickly. So how do you deal with this
challenge?
The first step
is to UNDERSTAND what is in the ESI/eDiscovery
data that you have. If its all good ole English
you dodged a bullet. Its it NOT, now you need
to quantify how much of what type of information
is NON English. With this broken out you can
create budgets and timelines for the data
collection all the way thru review and
production.
An excellent
place to start is to run the eDiscovery / ESI
you have thru earlyCASE ® - eDiscovery early case
assessment application. This will show you what
you have and provide you the tools and
visibility to establish both budgets and a game
plan on how to deal with it.
For a list
of the languages / locale ID / Countries that
earlyCASE ® detects
(click here).
For More Blog entries about early case
assessment for electronic discovery visit
http://blog.earlycase.com
