Ride the Lightning

Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.

Fun Factoids From the Era of Big Data

July 20, 2015

Hat tip to David J. Walton who included these fun factoids in an article entitled "Litigation and Trial Practice in the Era of Big Data" in the ABA's summer issue of Litigation magazine.

  • "From the beginning of the world through 2003, humankind created five exabytes of data. By 2010, we were creating five exabytes of data every two days.
  • For $60, you can now buy enough memory to store all the music ever created in the world.
  • It is estimated that by 2016, the gigabyte equivalent of all movies ever made will cross global IP networks every three minutes.
  • The average smartphone now has more computing power than all of NASA in 1969, the year Neil Armstrong landed on the moon."

As David points out in his excellent article (sorry, you have to be a subscriber to access it – at least currently), while big data does indeed mean "a lot of data," big data is really data analytics. And big data is having a huge impact on trial practice, some of which we see clearly (like technology assisted review) but many more impacts may be beyond our ability to see. Consider that one company, Lex Machina, is already using big data to predict outcomes in IP cases.

In ten years, I'm sure we'll look back astonished at the power of data analytics and how it affected the practice of law.

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