Litigation is a major problem these days for businesseswith a significant portion of the cost being the cost of finding and reviewing electronically stored information (ESI) for both Early Case Assessment (ECA) as well as eDiscovery Request response.

An Early Case Assessment capability provides you with 4 key benefits:

1. It provides an early indication of the merits of the case

I attended a couple of seminars last week - one in Chicago and one in Toronto.  Despite very different audiences (more of a legal flavor in Chicago and more of an IT / messaging administrator flavor in Toronto), the sentiments about eDiscovery were the same…it’s painful.  In fact, an audience member in Toronto said that painful is not the right word to describe eDiscovery.  A better word is “nightmare.”

Many companies I speak with mention the fact that they have some small percentage of their email traffic in an encrypted format. This can be either because of company or regulatory requirement or even more, because employees don’t want the content read by the company.

Encrypted email can represent a major risk in a corporate civil litigation if the company doesn’t have the encryption key.

Corporate legal departments fall into two main groups; those that have been through civil litigation, including discovery, and those that have not. Many of those legal departments that have not been through litigation and discovery have wildly different expectations as to their responsibilities and the work involved in responding to a discovery request.

A recent New York Times article discusses how today’s financial crisis sets up a probable boom in lawsuits. Investors feel wronged by banks and financial advisors.

The creators of some of these risky investment vehicles spoke publicly of how financially sound the vehicles were while (stupidly) emailing each other about how concerned they actually were. (It still amazes me what people will put in an email - completely oblivious to just how discoverable what they write is).

I attended the ACC (Association of Corporate Counsel) trade show in Seattle this week. What’s clear to me more than ever is that we are still in an extremely immature market phase for eDiscovery.

First of all, there is a clear disconnect between legal folks, records and information management folks, and IT. Why else would the biggest records management show of the year (ARMA) in Las Vegas take place the same week as the ACC show?

According to eWeek the following 5 businesses are poised to boom during the current financial crisis:

It’s easy to pass off eDiscovery as something only highly litigious or regulated companies have to be concerned about. The financial crisis seems to be reinforcing that assumption.

A recent eWeek article talks about companies (including Mimosa) awaiting a “litigation boom.” While this is not necessarily incorrect, what is not talked about is the many advantages that organizations get from having tools in house to conduct internal investigations.