2020 eDiscovery Industry Snapshot

At LegalWeek this year, Ipro conducted a survey to capture a snapshot of the eDiscovery industry in 2020, focused on these three areas:

• Data sizes
• Solution deployments
• Use of alternative legal service providers (ALSP)

Each of these continue to be significant within the eDiscovery world; however, this survey brought back some interesting results, reminding us that while there are definitely some overall changes happening in the industry with these trends, there are still some aspects of the process that may run counter to the big-picture reports.

Data Sizes:

The overall trend with the tech industry in general and the legal industry specifically, is that data sizes are growing. And this is undeniably true. However, when we asked about the average data size per matter, 53% of respondents said under 10GB. This draws an important distinction between the data sizes a corporate legal team or a law firm has to manage overall versus the data sizes that may be involved in a singular case or triggering event.

Solution Deployment:

For several years now, the benefits of the cloud have been touted in the eDiscovery industry, and there’s no doubt there are many. So it’s not really a surprise to see cloud deployments leading the survey results for this question. On-Prem deployments are still prevalent, most likely because of the demand for data control and security, particularly for corporate in-house legal teams. And interestingly, hybrid deployments – where a blend of on-prem or local deployments are scaled using the cloud and/or eDiscovery managed services – came in strong amongst respondents, solidifying this rising trend in legal tech.

Use of ALSPs:

And speaking of legal teams utilizing managed eDiscovery services, a large majority of respondents said Alternative Legal Service Providers were a regular part of their eDiscovery workflow. There are several reasons for this — predictable pricing, scalable eDiscovery on-demand, help with complex litigation – and as we can see, more and more legal teams are taking advantage of this option for an agile response to challenges that may arise.

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