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.

• We contacted potential participants - We started by contacting as many potential participants as we could. We sent individual email invitations to individuals at electronic discovery services and software providers, 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 sent spreadsheets to all participants - To each participant, we sent 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..
• Some participants stopped there - Some participants chose to provide information via spreadsheet as their schedule permitted and preferred to avoid scheduling an interview. For those people, we provided spreadsheets.
• We conducted telephone interviews - Many participants preferred a combination of spreadsheet and interview. We conducted the interviews by phone; generally they lasted between 45 and 90 minutes.
• We collected information from other on-line and off-line sources - Once again, we went to a variety of sources for information about the state of electronic discovery in 2007 and beyond.

We worked with data from or about 155 organizations that provided or consumed electronic discovery services or software - 107 providers, 29 law firms and 19 corporations. We initially contacted nearly 1,300 individuals about participation in the Survey. Ultimately, we gathered information from the organizations through direct confidential interviews and three indepth spreadsheets - one for law firms, a second for corporations, and a third for services and software providers. As in years past, the consumers represented a cross-section law firms as well as some of the largest companies in the country and the providers came from a robust cross section of the industry. Law firm participation included 16 of the AmLaw 100, 9 of them from the top 50, and 2 of those from the top 10. In addition to gathering information from these primary sources, we also collected an array of secondary source information from variety of business and information resources.

• For each participant in our Survey, we prepared a spreadsheet containing information from and about the participant's organization.
• We aggregated 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 weighted and rated each line of information.
• As part of the rating process, we considered information obtained from sources other than interviews.
• From there, we prepared a master spreadsheet consolidating information from the three higher-level spreadsheets.
• Working with these spreadsheets, we prepared our analyses and ultimately our reports.

For additional information about the methodology we used, click here.