Imagine your business is being sued. Suddenly, you’re required by law to unearth and deliver to a competitor or investigator massive amounts of electronic data—those emails sent by salespeople, your receptionist’s instant messages, CAD files edited by your engineers, and more—with every bit of it including metadata that reveals exactly when it was created, saved, or transmitted.

Are you prepared for that?

What we’re talking about here is e-Discovery. This is the process of collecting, analyzing, and exchanging electronic data during litigation or as part of an investigation by government agencies.

And it’s not just a concern for the Apples and the Samsungs of the world that are well-armed to take on the task. Even the smallest companies are legally on the hook for doing their own data discovery.

While you can certainly try to do it on you’re own, it’s far more common to outsource it.

“E-Discovery is a complicated, messy process,” says Andrew Sieja, founder and CEO of Chicago-based kCura, a company that makes software called Relativity that manages the processing, review, and analysis of data. “The collection phase involves the snatching of data from, say, the laptops of 50 different people. It requires experts to really understand where to pull data from the network.” And then there’s the task of reviewing it. That’s when companies rack up about 70 percent of the costs, says Barry Murphy, principal analyst with eDJ Group, an Austin, Texas-based research firm that specializes in e-Discovery.

Because of the expertise needed to pull off good e-Discovery, Sieja says there’s a whole cottage industry—a multi-billion dollar industry, in fact—built around providing consulting services for it. Research firm Gartner says the e-Discovery market is growing at a compounded annual growth rate of 14 percent and is estimated to reach $1.7 billion by 2014, but eDJ’s Murphy says that number could be much higher when you account for proactive information management—things like software for records management, e-mail archiving, and legal hold management tools. “I would say it’s upwards of $5 billion when you add in all the services and tools.”

via How to Survive Data Discovery in the Digital Age | Inc.com.