NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN IT USED TO (via The Mother Judd):

Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software (JOHN MARKOFF, 3/04/11, NY Times)

When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.

But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 5, 2011 7:07 AM