The concept of early case assessment (ECA) has been around for a long time, arguably dating back to the 2006 changes to the FRCP that, for all intents and purposes, created the e-discovery industry. But what is it, and more importantly, how can it help you?
Part of the confusion stems from the fact that different people use the term to refer to different parts of the e-discovery process. Is it simply evaluating a dataset or corpus of documents to determine what the potential e-discovery burden will be for a given matter? Or is it more qualitative, including an assessment of risk for a given matter—and all the strategy implications that assessment may imply?
