These are strange times indeed for the world of electronic data discovery. Many providers have suffered from dwindling revenues, some have failed. Yet as quickly as established providers shrink, disband, or are absorbed by others, new ones appear — with the ranks of EDD providers swelling to more than 600. The new kids in town are arriving with creative, innovative approaches to e-discovery: integrated litigation hold platforms; more efficient and user-friendly data collection software; strong, scalable, sophisticated advanced search tools; platforms capable of handling hundreds of languages; software as a service for nearly everything; and deeper services to deploy and support all these and more.
Five months ago providers were sloughing off employees; today they are scrambling to hire. The squeeze is so great that about a dozen providers bowed out of participating in the survey, pleading too much work and too few bodies to gather the information we seek.
Law firms have been losing review revenues. Wary of sharing specific numbers, nonetheless they are willing to admit that for them the bottom has dropped out of this market. But they, too, are striving to expand their presence in the EDD arena, with a rapidly-growing number of firms offering an ever-wider range of EDD services.
While two years ago every copy shop in the land became an EDD provider, today law firms nationwide purport to harbor deep EDD expertise. Much of this is a convenient fiction, useful for marketing but of questionable veracity when it comes to client service; many participants estimated that no more than 100 to 200 hundred lawyers in the entire country really "get" EDD.
More corporations than ever are struggling with how to handle EDD — preserving electronically stored information, getting it processed and reviewed and produced, and then paying for all the work, while trying to get this beast under control.
For some, costs have skyrocketed; one company reported processing and hosting expenditures leaping from under $100,000 three years ago to over $10 million last year.
Hiring at corporations also has been difficult. Estimates are that by now maybe 20 to 30 companies have been about to acquire or develop respectable in-house expertise, but many others are hard pressed to find someone — anyone — competent, available and capable of taking the internal EDD helm.
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Source: lawtechnews.com
By: George Socha & Tom Gelbmann
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