CMSWire presents Clearwell's Top Five eDiscovery Trends of 2010

Top 5 eDiscovery Trends of 2010

1. Early case assessment (ECA)

Over the past few months, we’ve covered a great deal about the benefits of early case assessment. Dean Gonsowski, VP E-Discovery Services at Clearwell Systems says that ECA will move from a “nice to have” to a “must have” requirement of any matter involving electronically stored information (ESI) due to the low cost of analysis and advancements in eDiscovery technology.

2. Technology-Lead Initiatives

As companies finally understand the complexity of eDiscovery and that there isn’t an “easy button” for implementing it, more energy will be dedicated to finding and building a better tool so that eDiscovery platforms can be implemented easier.

3. eDiscovery gets Project Managed

As eDiscovery tools become more sophisticated and require less technical know-how, the role of an in-house eDiscovery coordinator will emerge as more of a project management and analyst versus pure legal or IT.

4. Data Analytics Set Benchmarks

Data analytics will go from a theoretical to practical task as eDiscovery tools increasingly move in-house and departments enhance defensibility and add elements like sampling into the workflow.

Gonsowski thinks that companies will be asked to defend their statistics and data samples, making the keywords companies use to search statistically-defendable.

5. A Single eDiscovery Platform

Specific eDiscovery solutions will continue to become more comprehensive and move to platforms, thus requiring less information hand-offs between individual point solutions, cutting costs and lowering the risk of data loss. As eDiscovery emerges as an in-house tool, companies are realizing the benefit of having to manage all their data in one place.

Though Gonsowski is optimistic there will be more demand for single platforms, he’s uncertain as to whether the industry will see more deployments of actual platforms.