International eDiscovery in Pharma Litigation: Tackling Big Data in Big Pharma Law.

International eDiscovery in Pharma Litigation: Tackling Big Data in Big Pharma.

Eric Everson, MBA, MSIT-SE, Juris Doctorate Candidate*

Let me start by saying this bluntly, sometimes pharmaceuticals kill people.  If they don’t cause death, they can certainly cause serious permanent bodily damage.  Drug companies today are major multinational corporations that calculate certain risk variables against their potential profit with the expectation that the mountains of technical data involved will deter legal action.

The variable that these big pharma drug companies cannot ignore is the increasing sophistication of big data analytics tools that are increasingly being tailored to the legal industry.  With advances in Technology Assisted Review (TAR) and predictive coding, sorting through terabytes or even petabytes of data can be reduced to hours compared to the months that it used to take.

As law firms increasingly invest in eDiscovery teams that specialize in finding the proverbial needle in the haystack, big pharma is no longer able to hide behind dense mountains of data.  Technology specialists are infiltrating the practice of law ensuring that what is digital becomes discoverable as evidence at trial.  This specialization is accelerating the pace at which pharma law suits can be thoroughly developed and made ready for trial.  Technology efficiency in the practice of law is quickly becoming a threat to big pharma. 

As multinational enterprises, big pharma companies are also finding that the open discovery process applied in the American court system is becoming heavily influential in foreign courts too.  This means that even in courts where privacy once prevailed in favor of the drug companies, electronic disclosure is rapidly becoming par for the course.  Though cloud-based technology may provide advanced data archiving across an expansive global network, the consolidation and retrieval of such data is likewise advancing.  This accessibility and ease of data processing is rapidly creating a very hostile legal environment for big pharma.

eDiscovery software is rapidly accelerating the lifecycle of drug law suits and advances in international legal frameworks that support the eDiscovery process are forcing a change in the way big pharma creates and distributes new drugs.  With a variety of software companies focusing in on the development of eDiscovery tools, the lifecycle of big pharma law suits will only continue to diminish. These efficiencies will not only result in positive responses by drug companies to ensure quality, but will also facilitate justice for all those harmed by dangerous pharmaceuticals.         

#eDiscovery

@IntleDiscovery

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About the Author:  Eric Everson is a 3L law student at Florida A&M University – College of Law.  Prior to law school he earned an MBA and Masters in Software Engineering while he tenured ten years of executive leadership in the U.S. telecommunications industry.  The views and opinions presented in this blog are his own and are not to be construed as legal advice.  Eric Everson currently serves on the Board of Governors for The Florida Bar Young Lawyers Division Law Student Division and is the President of the Electronic Discovery Law Student Association at Florida A&M University – College of Law.  Follow @IntleDiscovery