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 lanuagues into the data collection, preservation, analysis, filtering, cullin, processing, reviewing…. As the world becomes a smaller business community because of technology and communications so does the demand that mutlilingual ESI will place on litigators, attorneys and the courts.    For instance the most common languages today are  (and the # of people speaking that language):

  1. Chinese* (937,132,000)
  2. Spanish (332,000,000)
  3. English (322,000,000)
  4. Bengali (189,000,000)
  5. Hindi/Urdu (182,000,000)
  6. Arabic* (174,950,000)
  7. Portuguese (170,000,000)
  8. Russian (170,000,000)
  9. Japanese (125,000,000)
  10. German (98,000,000)
  11. 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 execllent 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 more information on earlyCASE visit:   http://www.earlyCASE.com

Tom
View Tom. Strack @ earlycase.com's profile on LinkedIn