Lindbloom & Schulz, LLP is a small law firm based in Minneapolis, MN specializing in Intellectual Property and Real Estate law.  Named Partner Mrs. Lindbloom is responsible for overseeing the firm’s IT infrastructure and backup policy.  When Mrs. Lindbloom was first approached by Symagio regarding her data protection plan, she already knew the qualitative value of her data. 

For a quantitative (versus strictly qualitative) analysis of their backup policy, Symagio performed a simple calculation to show the monetary value of the work product of the firm.  

According to Mrs. Lindbloom, while the page count of any motion she submits to the court varies drastically, a recent Appeal Brief for a smaller client ran a total of 45 pages.   The firm uses Microsoft Word exclusively for such writing.  This 45 page Appeal Brief has a small footprint in terms of data storage: this one in particular containing nothing more than 120 Kilobytes.

However, the billable hours that go into such a brief can be staggering.  Mrs. Lindbloom billed 35 hours over a two week period for writing the brief; her Partner billed 10 while a 3rd year associate, 25.  The firm bills out their Partners at an hourly rate of $300, which is priced competitively in their market.  With the 3rd year associate billing at $160 per hour, the billable hours poured into the single document quickly add up:

42*300 + 10*300 + 25*160 = $19600. 

Furthermore, there were a number of other expenses directly associated with this Appeal Brief.  Lindbloom & Schulz uses Westlaw for all its legal research, which charges the firm a fee of $10 per case downloaded.  Citing 35 cases in all, while researching over 25 more, this adds another $600 of expenses to the production.

Lastly, having gone through numerous drafts and revisions, the firm incurred numerous printing charges.  Approximately 800 pages were printed, which at 10 cents per page, adds an additional $80.

A superficial estimate of the document’s worth is $20,280.  This does not, however, factor in the associated risk of losing such a document.  Most are now familiar with the now-infamous judgment in Coleman v. Morgan Stanley in which the court awarded the defendant over $1.4 billion in damages for failure to produce relevant data contained on backup tapes.  It is abundantly clear that no court will excuse a party simply because of data failure.   If Lindbloom & Schulz, LLP were to lose this Appeal Brief before the Court’s deadline because of a hard drive failure, the client could very well lose the case and the subsequent hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.  It is impossible to overemphasize such a profound risk. 

Extrapolating from this one Appeal Brief, then, gives us a rough estimate of the worth of the firm’s most important data.  Dividing the total cost by the actual footprint (.120 megabytes) gives us an approximate worth of $169,000 per megabyte. 

When we informed Mrs. Lindbloom of this, she wasn’t surprised: “Well, we always have a lot of cases going on at once, and any kind of data loss would disrupt every one of them.  And that’s not only bad business for us, it is terrible business for our clients.  They trust us to win cases.  If we lose all of our work product, we’ll lose the case every time.  And that, more than anything else, is something we simply cannot afford.”