B&L Associates

Report shows growing interest in eDiscovery tools

March 22, 2012

With digital data making up a greater proportion of corporate workloads than ever before, courts are beginning to extend many of the same expectations of physical records management to electronic data storage. With that in mind, attorneys are displaying a growing interest in eDiscovery technologies which can facilitate faster, more cost-effective search and recovery efforts.

According to legal staffing analysts from Robert Half, 2011 saw a marked increased in the demand for eDiscovery software and services. Approximately one-quarter of corporate legal departments recently surveyed by Robert Half reported increased investment in eDiscovery ventures last year. Moving forward, one in three lawyers expect their teams to ramp up funding levels in the next two years.

The majority of these expenses will likely be attributed to establishing more reliable, robust data storage and recovery systems. Despite the increasing legal significance of eDiscovery requests, 22 percent of survey respondents indicated that they were "not at all convinced" that their teams could efficiently respond to litigious or regulatory inquiries for information on social media sites. An additional 15 percent expressed similar doubts regarding their ability to reproduce data stored in the cloud.

"Attorneys should work with their IT teams to ensure that electronically-stored information, particularly on social media or cloud computing platforms, is accurate and defensible in court," Robert Half spokesman Charles Volkert explained. "Developing an efficient process to do this can be challenging, particularly when law firms and corporate law departments are already stretched thin."

As is often the case with complex business processes, eDiscovery practitioners can avoid unnecessary expenses by approaching a project with a well-crafted plan. With nearly 30 percent of respondents to the Robert Half survey reporting a lack of any standard operating procedure, it appears as though some companies may be better served by focusing more on strategy than merely technology.