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eDiscovery: Law Firms Ramp up Capabilities
It’s a sort of a ‘build it and they will come’ kind of story. There have been a combination of forces at work with technology being the enabler. There have been great advances in computer processing speeds, storage capacities, search, and content management. The efficiencies and advantages of digital data have been so compelling that now almost all new enterprise information is being created electronically. And the fact that organizational data has now become so easily accessible makes digital repositories a very common target of legal requests seeking to get an historical view into the enterprise.
The increasing demand to add eDiscovery to legal investigations means that law firms need to now ramp up their ability to initiate and oversee eDiscovery requests. The Cowen Intelligence group has recently done a survey of litigation support groups and found that the hours worked to support eDiscovery requests is growing rapidly.
In Q4 2009, law firms logged 61 percent additional hours, vendors supporting eDiscovery had 51 percent more hours, and corporations spent 35 percent more hours. Workloads from new cases have increased 65 percent at law firms, and workload from existing cases increased 47 percent.
The net result is that vendors, companies and law firms are all hiring to support eDiscovery operations. 60 percent of law firms expect to hire. 65 percent of vendors do too, as well as 35 percent of corporations.
“Dollars are opening up again,” said David Cowen of The Cowen Group. “Legal technology budgets that have been frozen the past 12-18 months are now thawing. The next three, six, and nine months will be very good for everyone with a card to play in the eDiscovery industry. Ironically, a silver lining of the recession is that it forced discipline among all parties to become more fully engaged in the eDiscovery process. Law firms and corporations alike have learned that there is no magic bullet or killer application that will solve all problems.”
