The eDiscovery Landscape

The eDiscovery landscape consists of pure-play eDiscovery software vendors (like Kazeon, Autonomy, Guidance etc.), legal service providers, hosting service providers and law firms. All these entities sell their product and services to corporations. Increasingly, we have seen a trend wherein corporations are starting to adopt eDiscovery in-house for reasons of cost, risk management and information control. The current economic climate is aggravating the situation and will be the death of legal service providers - $300/GB and above is not sustainable.

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!