Discoverable data volumes have grown exponentially and continue to do so at break-neck speed — industry forecasts predict electronically stored information (ESI) will see a five-fold growth in the short amount of time between now and 2020 alone. This is, of course, the driving factor as to why enterprises across verticals are spending more on e-discovery: an aggregated view of publicly available data projects values the industry currently at $10.1 billion and tracks the trend to nearly double in the next three years to each almost $19 billion.
For law firms, this pace of exponential growth is a substantial problem — mainly due to the fact that the law firm business model of processing, hosting and storing this avalanche of client data, however, has not evolved as quickly as the data itself.
Specifically, firms are struggling with a legacy practice of writing off litigation support/e-discovery and related costs but have been challenged to identify and implement recovery models or managed services models that are both acceptable to the firm and to their clients. On top of all of this, many firms simply fail to dispose of the data at the matter closing and costs continue to accumulate year over year.
New data sources and unprecedented volume aren’t the only challenges. Cross-border discovery and regulatory compliance, mostly related to new privacy rules like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, are forcing companies to re-evaluate their exposure while giving rise to new roles.
Of course, as well all know, you can’t manage what you can’t measure — but, to date, there’s been no industry-wide measurement of firms’ cost recovery practices, infrastructure and strategy of e-discovery and litigation support services that are both acceptable to the firm and to their clients. Mattern has launched the first ever Litigation Support & e-Discovery Cost Recovery Survey to gather that needed data to help drive firms’ better business decisions.
Like Mattern’s cost recovery survey, we expect the results of the e-Discovery and Litigation Cost Recovery Survey to quickly become an industry asset that helps provide the backbone for firms’ recovery models in these challenging areas. Here’s just a couple of samples of how firms are trying to creatively meet the market challenge and find the right model that is right for the firm and the client.
