[Cushman]

Out of curiosity, how much would you bid to reproduce some tens of millions of pages of documents in such a way that you would be willing to testify before a judge that every single one was true and accurate?

(Considering that the judge will not take your word for it, how much should you set aside to pay someone else to go through it all and check your work?)

[giardini]

Are you implying that someone actually "went through it all and checked the work"?

[Cushman]

Are you implying that Google spent three million dollars sending an intern down to Kinko's with a truck full of file boxes?

[cookiecaper]

As grellas clarified, only the $4 million requested went to document production. Lawyers fees have not been disclosed but likely exceeded $100 million. That's the contentious figure. $1-$2 per document is probably not totally unreasonable, but then I don't really know what goes into these things.

Also, in my uneducated opinion, I think "millions" of documents is probably not really credible in terms of what a normal person thinks of as a document. This may include the entirety of Android's source code, which is thousands of files ("documents") by itself. I'd like to be corrected on this if there is actually a real amount of work for each of those "millions" of documents entered into the case. (If there were millions of unique and independent documents for review, I don't think anyone would believe a court could truly process these in a timeframe of 18-24 months.)

[Cushman]

From the filing: "Google delivered to its document vendor over 97 million documents for electronic processing and review. ... Google’s document vendor filtered custodial documents for production by running agreed-upon key-term searches, and converted documents to TIFF images for production. Over the course of this litigation, Oracle served nine separate Requests for Production of Documents, with 204 individual document requests. Google electronically produced over 3.3 million documents in response to Oracle’s requests, and Google’s 60 separate document productions span over 20 million pages."

I suppose you can debate the exact figures if you like, but they did spend $2,900,349 on this, and I'm betting they got a good deal.

[cookiecaper]

As I stated, I'm not discussing document processing rates in my original comment. I don't contend that this is exorbitant. I also still don't believe your snippet is a sufficient basis upon which to accept there were really millions of documents in the sense of what most people would consider "documents".

[taligent]

No one does believe that a court would review every document ever read by anyone associated with the case.

That is the job of the law firm who would distill the thousands/millions of documents into a single argument for the court. Some documents maybe relevant. Some may not. The point is that it takes someone with skill a great deal of time to review them.