E-Discovery

What is E-Discovery?

Electronic discovery (also called e-discovery or eDiscovery) refers to any process in which electronic data is sought, located, secured and searched with the intent of using it as evidence in a civil or criminal legal case.

Today, on average, 96% of all documents created or received within an organization are in electronic format. While paper is not going away, it represents a minority of the total documents within an organization. In terms of electronic documents, email represents the majority; it has become the de facto communication mechanism. The average employee sends and receives more than 140 emails per day. Unlike paper, email tends to accumulate, quarter after quarter and year after year and organizations are flooded with it.

Motions to discover electronic data are common in today’s world of litigation; yet companies are often unprepared to find electronically stored information (ESI), especially email. This lack of preparedness is driving up the cost of e-discovery and the cost of litigation in general.

The 2008 Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey reports that commercial expenditures on Electronic Data Discovery (EDD) topped $2.7 billion in 2007, up 43 percent from 2006. They also predict that they will grow by 21 percent in 2008, 20 percent in 2009 and 15 percent in 2010, which equates to $4.5 billion in expenditures by the end of 2010.