The pharmaceutical and finance industries are the most mature when it comes to the use of e-discovery, according to a report from Exterro released on Monday.

Exterro partnered with EDRM at Duke Law to produce the report, which has responses from 218 different companies with at least 200 employees. All of the answers were anonymized so Exterro only knew the industry of the company and number of employees the respondents had in the company.

EDRM did not respond to request for comment on the report.

Jamal Stockton, a member of the board of directors at the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, said one of the reasons pharmaceutical and financial companies have more mature uses of e-discovery technology is because of the amount of outside counsel spend those companies have.

“When you have a lot of outside counsel spend, in terms of transformation and innovation internally, you're going to go after that e-discovery spend because it's costing me millions of dollars a year and it's the easiest thing for us to get our arms around in terms of controlling the spend and reducing it,” Stockton said.

Stockton also explained at their core financial services and pharmaceutical companies are partly technology companies and more likely to experiment with legal technology.

“Being technology companies, they're putting on the innovation hat and asking how they can use technology to transform business,” Stockton said. “That's part of the DNA of financial service and pharmaceutical companies.”

Bill Piwonka, chief marketing officer at Exterro, also said regulation and a high number of lawsuits play a role in how e-discovery technology is used in those sectors. He added this is the first report Exterro has put out on e-discovery maturity.

“What we are finding is that more and more organizations are treating legal operations and e-discovery as business processes,” Piwonka said. “Over the last five years we've seen a trend toward the legal department saying, 'We can treat a lot of what we do as business processes.'”

He said companies are about as mature with their use of e-discovery technology as he expected they would be and are working to become more efficient with the technology.

“Every matter is different and the scope is different, but you're doing the same thing; identifying data and identifying custodians. The steps you take to do that can be thought of as a business process,” Piwonka said. “If you take the business process approach you can identify where you're spending the most time and money.”