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The Second Age of e-Discovery

The Second Age of e-Discovery

Good governance – and the law – mandate that companies invest in e-discovery solutions for tracking down messages and files in the event of a probe

Mike Davis, an analyst at market research firm Ovum, believes that a familiar group of consulting giants will benefit from the e-discovery boom.

"The people who are going to make lots of money out of this are the Big Five," he says. "If you can't afford your own team, you are going to be services-led."

HP information management marketing director Erik Moller agrees that billable hours can mount up, especially when firms are new to e-discovery. "Typically, a SWAT team goes in, does a hit and legal teams make a lot of money," he says.

Moller says that many firms believe data has gone because they deleted it, without realising that messages and files can be easily recovered if they have not been destroyed. "The legacy information clean-up problem is the elephant in the room," he says. "It's purge, not delete."

Another problem, Moller notes, comes from the tension between IT departments seeking to keep storage volumes at a manageable level and the demands of regulators, but he believes that firms that build up experience in e-discovery can automate processes and cope with internal staff.

Autonomy's Eagan contends that the demands of e-discovery could lead to a new role where an IT expert partners with the legal counsel of the company.

Where next for e-discovery? Autonomy's roots in search are leading it to pursue more intelligent software where suggestive patterns can be automatically detected when parsing text. Image and audio searching are also likely to become more important as regulators demand more and more information.

Whether data resides in email, instant messaging system, phone call or video stream, companies are becoming liable to find information or suffer the consequences. Little wonder that e-discovery is becoming another critical piece of kit to serve the governance needs of organisations.

WHERE NEXT FOR E-DISCOVERY?

Today's search and e-discovery tools already do a good job of finding structured information such as data held in spreadsheets, databases and forms. However, the push is on to get a better insight into unstructured data such as text documents, presentation slides and, of course, emails.

Email messages have emerged as a rich source when searching for clues as to whether firms did or did not break the rules. Because of the ad hoc nature of email compositions, staff will often disclose information that they would not otherwise offer. Searching for keywords in messages and headers is a start but today's needs are more sophisticated. Therefore, software that can detect patterns of expression that give a clue as to content is highly valued.

Increasingly, experts say, regulators will also seek to gain access to other forms of communication, including phone conversations, instant messaging exchanges, video and still images. Software developers are building programs that can look for such files although the field remains quite new.

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