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Conducting the Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey takes about 9 months, starting in October with refinements to the model we use and ending with publication of the subscriber, participant and public reports in June.

How we gather information for our survey:

We contact potential participants - We started by contacting as many potential participants as we could. We send individual email invitations to individuals at electronic discovery services and software provider s, law firms and corporations. We also post open invitations on the Litigation Support Mailing List (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/litsupport), on this web site, and anywhere else suggested to us.
We send spreadsheets to all participants - To each participant, we send a spreadsheet to assist the participant in gathering data. Designed for easy review and data entry, the spreadsheets cover a wide range of electronic discovery activities. While we would love to have everyone fill out their spreadsheets in full, we know that will not be the case. We will be happy to take whatever information you are able to provide.
Some participants stop there - Some participants choose to provide information via spreadsheet as their schedule permits and prefer to avoid scheduling an interview. For those people, we provide spreadsheets and ask that they be returned by no later than March 31.
We conduct telephone interviews - Many participants prefer a combination of spreadsheet and interview. We conduct the interviews by phone; generally they last between 45 and 90 minutes. We are scheduling interviews now, and will be conducting them through the end of March.
We collect information from other on-line and off-line sources - Once again, we will be going to every source we can for information about the state of electronic discovery in 2007 and beyond. We will plow through hundreds of web sites, dig through piles of paper amassed since the late 1980's, and cross-check and cross-reference as much as we can.

How we evaluate the data we gather:

For each participant in our Survey, we prepared a spreadsheet containing information from and about the participant's organization.
For each electronic discovery services or software provider we evaluate but who does not elect to participate in the survey, we also prepare a spreadsheet.
We aggregate information from the individual spreadsheets into three higher-level spreadsheets, one for providers, one for law firm consumers, and one for corporate consumers. As part of the aggregation, we weight and rate each line of information.
As part of the rating process, we consider information obtained from sources other than interviews.
From there, we prepare a master spreadsheet consolidating information from the three higher-level spreadsheets.
Working with these spreadsheets, we prepare our analyses and ultimately our reports.