e-Discovery Goes Primetime
While the topic of e-Discovery is always of interest to CMSWire, national media outlets don’t often cover it. Yet, this month alone, e-Discovery has been covered by Forbes and the New York Times.
The Forbes article, which appeared on its blog and was written by attorney Ben Kerschberg, discusses the vast amount of data being created by companies and the inherent need for a cloud deployment of a unified legal repository. Kerschber writes
Point solutions cobbled together from different vendors to address specific cases is no longer enough. Legal Departments must adopt a coherent approach to e-Discovery such as a unified legal repository that meets its needs across the enterprise and under one umbrella.”
The New York Times approached e-Discovery from the perspective of jobs. The effectiveness of e-Discovery, as it turns out, is stealing jobs away from lawyers, which is having a noticeable effect, especially in the current economy. While the article does boast of the efficacy and need for e-Discovery in a corporate culture knee-deep in data and regulatory standards, it does also acknowledge its limits. NYT’s John Markoff writes
These new forms of automation have renewed the debate over the economic consequences of technological progress. … Automation of higher-level jobs is accelerating because of progress in computer science and linguistics.”
The article, which gives recognition to a few e-Discovery industry vendors such as Clearwell, Cataphora and Autonomy, does a reasonable job at explaining both the need for e-Discovery and its technology, yet presents e-Discovery technologies as “nice to have,” rather than a “need to have” application. At this point in time, companies can’t afford to go without a search, discovery and review process — whether it’s manual or automated.
via e-Discovery Briefs: Relativity, Predictive Coding, the National Press.
