Many have predicted the impending maturation of the e-discovery market, but while the market is feeling smaller and smaller to both buyers and vendors, the rate of consolidation in the e-discovery space slowed noticeably in 2017.

Gibson Dunn litigation partner Gareth Evans told LTN that market consolidation was a significant part of the e-discovery landscape in 2017. “There's this M&A feeding frenzy going on, and it's been going on for a while, but it seemed to even pick up the pace in 2017,” he said.

However, recently uncovered data around e-discovery's mergers and acquisitions might tell a slightly different story. Research compiled by Rob Robinson of Complex Discovery on the number of announced mergers and acquisitions in e-discovery shows that 2017 saw less, not more, consolidation than 2016. The decline in M&A activity, from 36 total M&A events in 2016 to just 24 in 2017, is the most significant drop in this space since 2013.

The year's first three months saw markedly little M&A activity, with only 3 major investments announced, but seemed to pick up through the end of the year, with 10 investments over the last quarter of the year.

Robinson tracked data from public e-discovery consolidation announcements, although he noted that not all M&A activity is made public.

The year still bore some notable M&A activity for e-discovery groups. OpenText's acquisition of Guidance Software last August was valued around $222 million, Morae Legal and Clutch Group announced a merger, and Xact Data Discovery, Lighthouse eDiscovery and Advanced Discovery each acquired competitor e-discovery groups.

The dip in M&A activity could just be a standard market fluctuation. Indeed, 2018 has already seen at least two different instances of M&A and investment in the e-discovery space, with JLL Partners' acquisition of Xact Data Discovery earlier this month and accounting firm Eide Bailey's acquisition of Utah-based Decipher Forensics.

Consultants have pointed to a wide set of potential reasons for a consolidating market. E-discovery vendors are increasingly charged with transnational projects that can be difficult for small shops to manage, and they now face new efficiency and data compliance scrutiny from corporate legal department customers.

“To answer those questions effectively required an outlay of capital,” Consilio CEO Andrew Macdonald previously told LTN.

Adding another wrinkle to the consolidation forces in e-discovery is the fact that technology startups, who often rely on the notion that better technology brings with it the potential for market disruption, have struggled to get potentially better technology noticed in an already crowded e-discovery field. Macdonald noted that while “there's been a lot of really cool technology,” many smaller companies struggle to scale that technology out.

E-discovery companies likely to come out on top, Macdonald said, “may not be the best software that is going to emerge, but it's the best funded, has the best capital structure and has the best discipline about how it's going to grow.”