Legal Research

"A Turbulent Year for E-Discovery"

Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi: " Within the electronic-discovery industry, the annual Socha-Gelbmann survey is as much anticipated as the Academy Awards are within the film industry. Every year since 2003, George Socha and Tom Gelbmann have conducted their survey of the e-discovery market, gathering information from providers, consumers and other sources and then slicing and dicing the data. And as has become a tradition, before they release the full survey, they provide an exclusive sneak-peak in the pages of Law Technology News.

One major change in the survey is that it no longer ranks EDD providers. "We felt rankings had become counterproductive, and were being used by too many people as a main or the sole reason to select or reject a provider." But the survey continues its tradition of providing both high-level and specific perspectives on the industry.

And its high-level assessment could not be more direct: "These are strange times indeed for the world of electronic data discovery." A variety of factors make for these strange times, the economy no doubt a major one. Among the observations Socha and Gelbmann offer:

• Many providers have suffered from dwindling revenues and some have failed.
• As quickly as established providers fail, new ones appear, with the number of EDD providers swelling to more than 600.
• Providers that five months ago were sloughing off employees are today scrambling to hire.
• For law firms, the bottom has dropped out of the EDD market, even as a rapidly growing number of firms offer an ever-wider range of EDD services.
• With more law firms claiming to have 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 in the survey believe that no more than 100 to 200 lawyers in the entire country really "get" EDD.

One positive note is that the turmoil in the EDD market is helping to drive innovation and control costs, the authors suggest.

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.

The preview published at LTN provides much more information about the survey's findings. The full 2009 survey will be available later for a purchase price of $5,000.

[Thanks to LTN editor Monica Bay for pointing to the survey at her blog The Common Scold.]

The active links are available at the source site listed below.

Source: Legal Blog Watch, 4 August 2009

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on August 05, 2009 (boomark / email).