A few weeks ago, the annual Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey was released, highlighting several trends in the ediscovery market.

First, let’s start with market size: it appears that the overall ediscovery market grew in 2009, up 10% from 2008.  This is modest growth in good years, but in these lean times it shows that law firms have found value and are actually saving money by using ediscovery services.  Expect to see beat-the-market growth from the vendors who do the best job of culling document sets down, leading to less attorney document review work.

However, another recent trend may be pushing documents out of the hands of ediscovery vendors.  Targeted collection and preservation has made some of these document culling tools less useful, as attorneys gain experience in requesting specific documents during litigation.  The usefulness of the blanket “all documents relating to XYZ” request is outweighed by the cost of culling those documents down and then reviewing them.  This will be especially true as the data deluge continues, with ediscovery document sources becoming more numerous with no end in sight.

This is good news for many law firms engaged in litigation.  Instead of paying contract attorneys to review large swaths of varied documents, you can have those lawyers (and your experts) focus on a smaller set of documents, reducing cost.

Next post (later this week!) we’ll include some information on how the 2010 Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey relates to information management, and we’ll discuss a few other trends that we expect to continue in 2010 in the ediscovery market.

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