ILTA 2011: Big data, discovery and collaboration demand our legal attention

By Sean Martin, CISSP, founder of imsmartin consulting, Network World
September 23, 2011 04:30 PM ET

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eDiscovery was one of the hot topics at the recent International Legal Technology Association 2011 (ILTA 2011) Conference in Nashville, Tenn., which drew more than 2,500 attendees. Nearly 25% of the 185 vendors exhibiting at the show claimed to provide discovery products and/or services, and many more had offerings that could play a role.

Why did eDiscovery make such a big impact, and why now? The answer may lie in the fact that as law firms and in-house counsel engage in the identification, collection and processing of electronic evidence, they are experiencing significant challenges in the centralization, management and preservation of the information.

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As way of background, it has been roughly five years since electronic discovery was introduced by the U.S. Federal courts as part of amendments made to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). eDiscovery data, often referred to as electronically stored information (ESI), is digital data identified, collected and placed on legal hold as digital evidence until it is analyzed using digital forensic procedures in preparation for various types of legal matters and court proceedings.

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eDiscovery is hard to get right, and, to make matters worse, the sheer volume of data and the number of data sources continues to grow exponentially. In a recent IDC report sponsored by EMC, the research firm forecasted that, by the end of this year, the volume of data created annually is expected to exceed 1.8 zettabytes, having grown by a factor of nine over the previous five years. That number is anticipated to increase to 35 zettabytes created annually by 2020.

That, of course, is a big challenge for inside counsel, law firms and lawyers who will need to securely store and then make sense of the data collected. This is a likely reason why 32 vendors at the conference provide document management and/or document storage products and services. An interesting side point is that the products and services offered by 11 of these firms are either cloud-enabled or cloud-based.

Where does all of this ESI data come from? It comes from any consumer, enterprise or government source of data creation, storage and communication operation imaginable: hard drives, databases, document management systems, websites, email and messaging systems, message boards, social networks and mobile devices, just to name a few.

To help organizations gain some level of control over this data, Recommind Inc. was demonstrating its eDiscovery solution designed to help organizations and firms get a grip on big data. The company claims its predictive analytics and predictive coding technologies will enable organizations to perform their own in-house collection of evidence while intelligently filtering out the unnecessary items, reducing the amount of data to be collected and stored. [Also see: "E-discovery options increase"]

During a few sessions at ILTA, however, there was discussion surrounding the risks associated with self-collection. The act of self-collection effectively puts the responsibility of preserving the evidence on the backs of the organizations themselves as they would be handling the collection and management of the evidence directly; consider a victim in an assault case collecting the weapon(s) and other evidence used in or associated with the assault. The risk here is that the organization may not have a full legal grasp of the requirements defining what needs to be collected from which assets during which time periods; a key piece of evidence could be missed.