Yeah, oh, yeah! Read how in this Legal Technology article about how MoFo responded when a small client was hit with a huge discovery request:
"In the fall of 2005, a small Israeli technology startup came to San Francisco’s Morrison & Foerster with a lawsuit — and, soon enough, a problem.
[snip]
"The stakes weren’t particularly high — just a few million dollars. But after the case was filed, the defendant hit back with an electronic discovery request — every relevant e-mail, Microsoft Word file, spreadsheet, you name it — so onerous that its cost alone would take a fair chunk of any judgment.
"’We saw that it was going to take several hundred thousand dollars to do this,’ says Oz Benamram, director of knowledge management and Israel practice counsel at MoFo. In fact, there was nothing terribly unique about this situation. As more correspondence and information is stored electronically, e-discovery is requiring more time, and more dollars, than ever before.
"What was different was MoFo’s solution. Realizing that the standard way of reviewing documents — having teams of associates, or lower-priced contract attorneys, sift through anything that could be relevant, deciding what was responsive and had to be turned over, and what was privileged and needed to be kept — wasn’t going to cut it, the firm suggested a radical approach: automate almost everything."
Be sure to read the PROFIT CENTER? section at the very end of this article.