E-discovery Tools - Growing in Relevance for SMBs Too

By CIOReview | Wednesday, December 21, 2016

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E-discovery is expanding its stretch and today it has penetrated Small and Medium businesses (SMBs). IDC reports that at the end of 2015, e-discovery services reached $8.2 billion. Further, the forecast also revealed that this market will grow at a 9.8 percent CAGR and will push the combined software market and services over $14.7 billion by 2019. As there are vendors offering E-discovery services and software which have different features and functionality, for a CIO it becomes critical to select an e-discovery tool that suits the needs of their organization.

The widespread use of Electronically Stored Information (ESI) has enabled E-discovery as an essential need in every sector. In the current E-discovery landscape, vendors are leveraging cloud, big data and IoT to deliver greater value to the end users, delivering E-discovery tools with varying features and functionalities. There are Linear tools available for those users who review each document at a particular time. Further, with the advent of analytics and automation, vendors are trying to incorporate these advanced features within their document management solutions with a vision to automate the process of document management. IBM’s eDiscovery Manager enables IT and legal staff to identify, preserve, and export-import case-relevant content with lower costs. Whereas, small vendor such as Exterro provides Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) E-discovery solutions for data mapping, data management, legal hold and project management.

The analytics technology has been useful for lawyers to do exemplar searches over ESIs and review the document with greater agility, scalability, flexibility, stability, and security. The review tools used in E-discovery enables users to conduct tiered and batched review by using a complete suite of analytic capabilities. The speed and accuracy allows attorneys to take quick decisions during the E-discovery process, reducing idle time.

For every ESI, it is important to filter the documents. In order to execute proper filtering, E-discovery Archiving and Preserving tools is a must. CIOs need to implement E-discovery archiving tool that can process through old documents and filter it and save it onto another location by creating a copy of ESI. This makes it easy for the users to differentiate between the old and new ESI. Vendors offer archiving and preserving tools for emails, projects and legitimate documents. This helps user to automate the process of archiving and preserving the ESIs; the tool also saves a lot of users who spend countless hours shifting through old or outdated project files.

Security, backup, governance, and costs are some of the vital factors CIOs think of before investing or buying a product or solution. E-discovery tools have proven to be game changer when it comes to litigation cost management, but in a seventh annual benchmarking study of e-discovery practices for government conducted by Deloitte, results revealed that about 75 percent of the respondents feel that they lack technical support when dealing with opposing counsel. In order to dramatically reduce cost, enterprises need to develop a litigation policy. Additionally, CIOs need to create, follow, and enforce an ESI records retention policy to control legacy data, this will help in having less data to collect / review.