Originally published February 23 2006
Electronic discovery becoming a booming field
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Several factors are responsible for the increase, including inexpensive data storage, high-profile lawsuits and new laws that demand thorough corporate archiving. Electronic discovery is now worth close to $2 billion and growing.
Day and night, rows of whirring, blinking computers sock away enormous batches of digital records sent by companies involved in lawsuits.
Other files are discovered deep in hard drives -- wedged between everything from personal e-mails to pornography -- by Kroll Ontrack forensic teams whose code names keep their missions secret.
Electronic discovery was commonly performed by local computer experts who played golf with law firm procurement officers.
But several factors -- including the inexpensive abundance of data storage, high-profile lawsuits and strict new laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley that demand thorough corporate archiving -- are making electronic discovery a lucrative and competitive slice of information technology.
The overall market is worth close to $2 billion and growing at about 35 percent a year, says Michael Clark, who analyzes the field at EDDix.
The number of companies offering computer-related evidence gathering appears to have doubled in the past two or three years, with several hundred now hanging a shingle.
Increasingly, e-discovery customers are not just law firms enmeshed in big corporate cases.
After all, 90 percent of U.S. corporations are engaged in some type of litigation, according to research by the law firm Fulbright & Jaworski.
In one key ruling, the judge slapped UBS for failing to recognize that the missing e-mails likely would end up being relevant to future litigation.
"Some of those standards are fairly onerous even to sophisticated, highly litigious businesses," said Gerald Massey, head of Fios.
Generally, a vendor gets raw material from corporate computers and backup tapes, then dives in -- with specialized software rather than humans -- to remove duplicate files or records that have no bearing on a case, while zeroing in on those that might.
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