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E-Discovery: Expanding into Cloud-Based and Social Media
E-discovery is the process of searching for and securing electronic data and documents with the intent of using the information as evidence relative to a lawsuit. Outside the United States, e-discovery is often referred to as e-disclosure. Traditionally, many of the steps of e-discovery were performed manually and with the assistance of outside legal experts, but as the amount of electronic data organizations manage grows and as the frequency of e-discovery requests increase, organizations are finding it more cost effective to adopt e-discovery technology solutions.
A recent report by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) and sponsored by e-discovery vendor Clearwell Systems finds that increasingly organizations are bringing e-discovery in-house. The report also shows that e-discovery process is now expanding to include information stored with cloud-based computing and social media.
30 percent of Fortune 2000 businesses now say that cloud computing data is now considered as ‘in-scope’ during an e-discovery investigation. The report expects that by the end of this year that number will jump to 60 percent of organizations. Having to search both internal and external data repositories clearly complicates the e-discovery process. Only a quarter of companies say that they are now prepared to include cloud-based data searches as part of an e-discovery request. 37 percent of companies say that their organization has no policy yet around cloud-based e-discoveries.
Other results reported include:
- 60 percent of organizations will be using cloud-based applications by the end of 2011
- 70 percent of organizations are seeing year over year increases in the number of e-discovery requests to which they need to respond.
- 50 percent of organizations say that the number of lawsuits that they were faced increased by at least 20 percent last year
- 61 percent said that collaborative technologies, like SharePoint, are becoming pervasive in their organizations
- 58 percent of organizations expect that social media data will become fair game for e-discovery requests
- 93 percent of organizations are in the process of bringing the e-discovery process in-house.
