Overview

E-discovery is a maturing market, with entrants from multiple categories, including storage and archiving, search and information access, content and records management, and workflow, as well as tools designed as end-user applications for legal professionals.

Enterprises purchasing e-discovery software can reduce the costs of litigation by improving their control over unstructured or semi-structured content, in particular e-mail; cutting costs and risks by taking control of litigation hold, litigation-hold-tracking, file collection, file processing and legal review instead of outsourcing these functions.

However as this briefing from EMC Corporation explains, selection of e-discovery software should always be a joint decision - and sometimes a joint purchase - between the IT and the legal departments, who must work together to determine the needs of the organisation and the individual users, and to build the business case for purchase.