"E-Discovery Ensures Evidence Can't Hide"

Here in the Seattle office, we recently started working with local e-discovery company EED. The company—which provides full-service legal discovery solutions and services, including e-discovery process consulting services, document collection and technology-enabled review solutions—is in what analysts are predicting to be a very hot space: According to Forrester Research, spending on e-discovery technology will increase from $1.4 billion in 2006 to more than $4.8 billion in 2011. And here's why...
 
In today’s digital world, it’s required by law that companies be able to easily produce electronic documents (including e-mail, instant messaging chats, Microsoft Office files, accounting databases, CAD/CAM files, Web sites, and any other electronically-stored information which could be relevant) if needed. And recent legislation has significantly increased the number of cases and the amount of data subject to analysis and review. Because of the HUGE volumes of electronic information that companies today posses (more than 90 percent of business records are created electronically, and 40 percent of them are never converted to paper), this process—called the review process in the legal industry—can be very lengthy and expensive: On average, it costs $1,800 to process and prepare data for analysis, and $250 per hour to analyze and review it. And of the data analyzed, only 10-20 percent of that ends up being relevant while 80-90 percent is irrelevant to the case.

This article from Investor's Business Daily highlights some interesting statistics about the e-discovery market, as well as some real-life examples of the benefits (ROI, time savings, etc.) that these types of solutions and services, such as those offered by EED, can provide.