As a young associate almost thirty years ago I worked on an antitrust case that involved what at the time seemed like an incredible volume of over one million pages of documents. The law firm rented empty office space and filled an entire room with boxes of documents. I supervised a team of three paralegals and we spent months in that office, reviewing, selecting, redacting and bate stamping. We thought it was a massive project.

Today a one GB file can contain as many as 65,000 pages of Word documents or 750,000 text documents. Ninety six to ninety nine percent of business documents are created on computers. Budget computers have hard drives of 160 GB. Many cases today involve volumes of evidence that are thousands of times greater than what I once thought was a huge case.