New Survey Reveals Locating Data Is #1 E-Discovery Challenge for In-House Legal and IT Teams

Global News

12
May
2015

Editor

Exterro Inc., the preferred provider of e-discovery and information governance software specifically designed for Global 2000 organizations, today released the findings of its “In-House Legal & IT’s Biggest E-Discovery Challenges” survey. Findings from the new survey indicate locating potentially relevant electronically stored information (ESI) is the number one challenge for both IT and Legal teams at global enterprises.

The survey reflects 140 responses received from in-house IT, legal directors, attorney, litigation support manager, and paralegal professionals in April.

Biggest E-Discovery Challenge Survey Results

The respondents in the new survey represent a wide variety of industries, including financial services, energy/oil & gas, technology, healthcare, pharmaceutical and manufacturing. The overall survey results rank the biggest e-discovery challenge as follows: 

1. Locating potentially responsive data (36.4%)
2. Controlling the amount of data sent for review (14.3%)
3. Managing multiple e-discovery projects and once (13.6%)
4. Defensibly deleting data that was on legal hold (12.9%)
5. Tracking legal holds (7.9%)
6. Other (15%)

“The volumes, types and locations of ESI that must be preserved, collected and analyzed during e-discovery continue to escalate at an alarming rate, making it extremely challenging to remain compliant without a repeatable process and solid technology in place to manage it,” said Bill Piwonka, chief marketing officer at Exterro. “Our intent with this survey was to shed light on which aspects of e-discovery are the most challenging for the different stakeholders involved in the process as well as to educate them on solutions available to address these challenges.”

Comments from the Survey Respondents

Specific responses as to why ESI is the biggest e-discovery challenge is reflected as follows:

• IT: “New ways of working across multiple new platforms, the cloud and large numbers of different mobile devices are all making it more difficult to find and preserve responsive information.”
• Legal Director: “With employees, customers and business partners spread across the country, and each averaging regular access to 5 "connected" devices, including BYOD, it is challenging for the legal department to be confident that all relevant material has been gathered.  The mixing of personal and business data on certain devices further exacerbates the challenge.”
• Attorney: “In a distributed organization, particularly one that evolved from different corporate entities combined into one, it can be challenging (at best) to identify the location of all potentially responsive data, and the stakeholders needed to acquire those data.”
• Litigation Support Manager: “Managing multiple projects from a single client can sometimes lead to confusion over requirements”
• Paralegal: “We are a large company and our network setup is complicated. It takes time to pull the data we need.”

Some of the “other” challenges identified included:

• IT: “I'm not always sure what data is deleted or if I need to keep the data for legal record reasons.”
• Legal Director: “Addressing the differences between the U.S. e-discovery system and that in other countries, including privacy and privilege concerns”
• Attorney: “Our biggest e-discovery challenge is keeping up with the changing IT systems (software and hardware) within our company.”
• Litigation Support Manager: “Finding innovation in the eDiscovery field.”
• Paralegal: “Ensuring units within the corporation not withhold pertinent information and have deleted unnecessary information after a project is completed.”

Results Analyzed on May 6 Webcast

Exterro’s Joe Mulenex, solutions consultant manager, and Ed Lee, managing director at Alvarez & Marsal, analyzed the results of this survey and provided guidance on how to address the challenges in an upcoming webcast being hosted today, May 6, entitled “Practical Advice for Your Biggest E-Discovery Challenges.” In the webcast, 42% of the attendees indicated that they are actively involved in an active initiative to improve e-discovery processes or buy e-discovery software.