Will big data tools make proportionality irrelevant?

• Position: BIG DATA - Brief article

It may be hard to believe at first, but there's a real possibility that big data tools could make proportionality a non-issue--or at least less of an issue--in legal matters.

Proportionality has been a factor because the costs of searching for immense amounts of electronically stored information can be crippling. The courts instituted a formula to ensure production expenses didn't exceed a reasonable percentage of the settlement being sought.

The emergence of big data platforms, however, has "so drastically reduced the burden side of the pro portionality analysis that it may no longer be credible to limit or preclude discovery in many cases," suggested James Shook, director of e-discovery and compliance legal practice at EMC Corp. in Atlanta, in an article he penned for Law Technology News.

"The same proportionality rule that protected us from technology may now be in danger of elimination by technology," he wrote.

Shook was referencing technologies such as the open source platform Hadoop, which allows organizations to store a large number of files and very...