E-discovery spending slows a bit

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were amended in 2006 to cover the discovery in civil trials of all electronic information and records, referred to as electronically stored information. This brought about the whole e-discovery movement, which aims to archive and make searchable all relevant Word, PDF and other documents, spreadsheets, email, instant messages, database information, audio, video and more. Some would put mobile phone communications on the list. So it's fair to say, this goes way beyond email archiving.

The FRCP is hardly the only driver of the movement to better store and archive material, but it's something few companies can ignore. You can gamble, but you may pay the price later in court. While Gartner predicts that spending on e-discovery software will grow to more than $1 billion in 2009, up 33 percent from 2008, we may be seeing some hiccups. Growth of about 30 percent and 25 percent in 2010 seem about right to industry executives. 

Dean Gonsowski, VP of E-discovery Services at Clearwell Systems says, "Like many other large budget line items, expenses around e-discovery will continue to be closely scrutinized next year. As a result, we'll see more companies trying to contain costs by bringing early case analysis technologies in-house to dramatically reduce costs and deliver strong ROI." 

Some of the growth may result in part from higher prices, Bloomberg suggests. From the legal side, some vendors, such as Epiq have noted some moderation. But the big boys in the tech vendor world--the likes of EMC, Oracle and IBM--still seem top be bent on integrating the functionality with larger offerings in content management and archiving. EMC, for example, is betting that its purchase of e-discovery software vendor Kazeon will be a nice addition to its SourceOne platform. One that might allow EMC to make up ground on content management power Autonomy.

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