Interesting Times in the eDiscovery Market
Lots of chatter on the recent Kazeon / Attenex announcement that promises eDiscovery processing costs as low as $4.30 per Gigabyte. Many experienced eDiscovery folks have cried foul, citing the intricate details of eDiscovery processing and the inherent costs. C’mon folks - somewhere the twain shall meet. eDiscovery processing costs are going to come down no matter what. The technology for processing is getting better and, more importantly, organizations are starting to proactively manage much of their discoverable information (though not enough for my liking). How fast we go from $2,000 per GB for processing to less than $5 per GB remains to be seen. That debate, frankly, takes us away from the more important issues to be solve. Why? Because everyone is focused on the ability to collect and find legacy information that is traditionally unmanaged. What the focus should be on is proactively managing this information. That’s right - setting retention policies, getting rid of non-necessary content; these types of actions are what will eventually lead to the elimination of processing fees. But, the legacy data messes that exist within organizations will keep processing vendors busy for quite some time.
At the end of the day, organizations need to realize what they can change and what they can’t. They can proactively archive content, set retention policies, and be sure to get rid of what they don’t need in order to directly decrease the cost of eDiscovery. They can begin to address legacy content messes only after they get an infrastructure in place - typically by migrating legacy content into their archive and then setting retention. Let’s not take our eyes of this prize by arguing over the true cost of today’s processing activities.
