Not long ago, the pain of analyzing electronically stored information for legal e-discovery, regulatory inquiries, and corporate investigations was hardly a blip on the radar screen. The requests were far and few between and, significantly more time was spent chasing down memos tucked away in filing cabinets than worrying about a handful of innocuous electronic documents. E-Discovery was in its infancy, and the costly and labor intensive process of sifting through and analyzing documents simply wasn’t worth re-thinking given the low volume of cases and data that needed to be reviewed.
Fast forward to 2007, where e-discovery and its concomitant analysis has become a major component of any discovery request. According to an online article from Law.com, more than 90 percent of new business records are created electronically, and 40 percent of them are never converted to paper. In fact, in its End-User Survey & Market Forecast 2006-2010, research firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) found that 42 percent of respondents state that their organization has been involved in a legal proceeding or regulatory inquiry that necessitated the search for and retrieval of electronic records. E-mail, in particular, has become a key issue as it’s used in nearly every business transaction: negotiating contract terms, settling disputes, acknowledging agreements and finalizing documents.
