George and Tom are the experts behind the annual Socha-Gelbmann eDiscovery Survey. They will discuss the essentials of eDiscovery and key considerations while implementing eDiscovery processes. Please attend this once-only webinar to understand how to be successful with your eDiscovery practices whether you are a corporation, a law firm or a legal service provider. Bring your questions to the webinar, or submit them beforehand.

We believe that the eDiscovery market is taking off especially as corporations are  investing in litigation support software in-house. The market has been seeing a shift in the spending – away from Legal Service providers and consultants, and toward in-house software. For obvious reasons, we support this trend; seriously, corporations are going to save substantial amounts of money in this process, and it’s going to make life easy for legal professionals who discover, collect, process, analyze and review data, and for IT professionals who manage the infrastructure and help in the eDiscovery process, especially collection and legal hold.

It’s going to take Autonomy a while though, to deliver an integrated End-to-End eDiscovery solution for in-house deployment. It’s not an easy task to integrate massive applications like Zantaz, Interwoven etc. Let’s watch them unfold over the course of this year.

As a result, the role of legal service providers has been declining since last year and there is ample evidence of that trend accelerating this year. Take a look at the recent bankruptcy declaration of Onsite3 (powered by the expensive, niche player – Clearwell Systems who is known to charge upwards of $300/GB). And consider some other examples, Attenex was bought by FTI for a relatively small amount for its Patterns product offering, Stratify was absorbed by Iron Mountain, MetaLINCS by Seagate, Discovery Mining by Interwoven, Applied Discovery by LexisNexis and the list continues to grow.

Legal Service providers, whose business models are built on expensive tools and vast numbers of people, cannot sustain their businesses as the economic climate has changed. These unnecessary costs have been rejected by Corporations lately, and even though they have come down from their exorbitant levels of $2000/GB to $900/GB since last year, they are still unjustified costs. Cost-effective and defensible End-to-End eDiscovery software options for in-house deployment have become available. Change is necessary and is inevitable.

Our prediction for this year – eDiscovery software adoption in-house within corporations is going to rise exponentially. A large part of this growth is going to be attributed to the new deployments corporations are going to undertake, and partially to the decline of the legal service provider market.

Here’s to the corporations who want to keep their costs in check and want to take control of their eDiscovery process. We are with you!