The e-discovery process has to be handled with utmost care, and when done wrong, it could be full of major legal and logistical headaches for corporate lawyers. According to data gathered by e-discovery software company Exterro Inc., the biggest challenge facing in-house legal and IT concerning e-discovery is locating potentially responsive data in the first place.

Some 35 percent of the 140 professionals from across a variety of industries surveyed believe that tracking down the electronically stored information that matters is the hardest part of the whole process, outpacing other challenges such as tracking legal holds and managing multiple e-discovery projects all at once.

Bill Piwonka, chief marketing officer at Exterro, told CorpCounsel.com that given the importance of data, it makes sense that the location challenge topped the list. “When you step back, it's not terribly surprising given how quickly content is getting created, and how many sources of content are used daily,” he said. New ways of generating more data are popping up all the time. A few years ago it was cloud computing and social media. Now other data generators such as the Internet of Things have been added.