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Over 80% of e-Discovery Users Plan to Migrate to the Cloud

Expect 2012 to be the year cloud e-discovery takes off – and not just because the cloud is becoming an ever-increasing force in business operations – legal departments are leveraging the cloud to bring discovery functions in house for better control of their data and costs.

According to a recent poll of lawyers at mid-to-large sized law firms and Fortune 1000 companies, 86 percent have decided to take back in house some portion of the e-discovery process. The move to bring these functions back in house is being spurred on by the cost of discovery services vendors and concern for the security of business data. Information management, preservation & collection and data review rank high among the tasks these firms and companies have decided to in-source.

Many law firms and legal departments are able to bring some of their e-discovery in house by leveraging a cloud-based or SaaS solution. In the same survey, 81 percent of the respondents report that they’ll use the cloud for e-discovery or data storage in the next year.

Cloud-based e-discovery providers enable legal departments to remain in control of their data and their e-discovery budget with predictable, on demand pricing models.

 

Cloud Data Management with EDiscovery

One of the benefits of maintaining electronic records are the faster, easier and cheaper tools available for e-discovery. Cloud e-Discovery providers offer defensible online e-discovery solutions that identify, collect and preserve your data then deliver you clear catalogues and indexes of all of the relevant documents.

 

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that as companies become more reliant on non-physical data, demands to access that data in the course of legal or regulatory proceeding are also increasing. Courts and regulatory overseers have exacting standards for how digital data should be archived. Failing to meet those standards for data storage, management and discovery could result in sanctions or heavy financial fines.

 

To avoid these penalties, many organizations are considering emerging technologies including cloud-based solutions. The obvious initial lure of the cloud is cheap, scalable off-site data storage that doesn’t tax your infrastructure or IT staff. When choosing a cloud-service provider, keep in mind that, to satisfy legal and regulatory inquiries you will need to always maintain the ability to access any given piece of stored data in real time.

 

Because courts do not accept disorganized record keeping as an excuse for not being able to produce the requested piece of information in the allotted time, all data stored in the cloud must be well organized.

 

To make locating crucial documents easier, your cloud service provider should be able to automate a data retention policy to regain all information you need for day to day business operations along with anything you could potential need for legal or regulatory reasons.

 

In addition to a tight data retention policy, identifying and deleting duplicate information can decrease the number of documents you have to store and ultimately the volume of data that could be subject to an e-discovery process. Cloud e-Discovery providers may offer automated legal hold solutions that will to prevent accidental data destruction.

Cloud e-Discovery

 Electronic Discovery is migrating to the cloud.

E-Discovery – the process by which evidence is identified and extracted from a company’s electronic data during civil litigation – is a growing market. Some predict that the size of the industry will grow from around $3 billion per year in 201o to an estimated $6 billion by 2013.

Industry experts predict that of the 20 or so companies that currently dominate the Electronic Discovery space, the biggest winners in the expansion will be the ones with proprietary platforms they can hone and perfect rather than those who are piecing together an discovery packages through a variety of methods.

Cloud e-Discovery is based on a three level system: IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service).

Cloud platforms have the advantages of being accessible on demand at any time or location. They can also be run on any operating system.

Because of the flexibility of the platform, clients can scale the amount of service they need over time without any additional cost. Clients pay for usage only and contract terms can be as short as a month.

There is no need to install software or pay for upgrades as the system improves. Furthermore, some estimates find that using a cloud-based e-Discovery vendor could reduce your IT infrastructure costs by 54 percent by reducing your IT staff hours and the cost of software and hardware upgrades.