As the eDiscovery imperative took root at many organizations, legal departments took the lead in ensuring compliance. The process has quickly veered into the realm of IT, however, which has required vendors to re-think their sales strategies.

EnterpriseStorageForum.com notes: "Legal used to have a stranglehold on budgets and purchasing decisions. But as eDiscovery products around search and collections grew in importance, they increasingly impacted IT. The size of data collections grew, and the cost of culling the results for review was and is prohibitive. Attorneys look to their eDiscovery vendors and to IT for help in collecting more relevant data faster."

As of now, the IT staff are not necessarily making the purchase decision. But as the legal staff looks to the IT staff for critical systems, the input from the IT side is critical. Vendors have to take all that into account as they plan their pitches. At many places, IT will consider eDiscovery its natural domain, as it essentially boils down to yet another example of data retention, intelligent storage and retrieval. Hosted solutions have come to the fore of course. But even that will likely entail a discussion between the IT and legal teams. The good news is that e-Discovery vendors tend to be very comfortable in the realm of IT-speak. This trend is good one for most firms.

For more:
- here's the article

Related articles:
Bloomberg to enter e-discovery market  
E-discovery looms as a growth market  
E-discovery spending slows a bit