Growth and Expansion in E-Discovery and Document Review

Although technological advancement such as predictive coding may signal the decline of document review by live reviewers, there is plenty of growth in the e-discovery document review industry.

Last week, Merrill Corporation announced the opening of a Legal Process Outsourcing center in Chennai, India. The LPO center will provide managed document review, contracts management and corporate due diligence services. In addition to the central office in Chennai, Merrill will operate a satellite office in Coimbatore, India

Gartner Group predicts growth of 14% with a peak of $1.5 billion in 2013. In a 2010 CompTIA survey of 650 IT professionals about e-discovery trends and practices, 53% responded that they expect their companies to increase the use of e-discovery in the next few years.

A recent report published by TechNavio declares that the LPO industry in India is expected to grow at 27.7% between 2010 and 2014.

Two factors are pushing the growth in the e-discovery and document review industry. First, there is constant upward spiral in civil litigation and regulatory oversight, which requires the production of documentation of the business activities. Second, the expansion of new communications media that generates more content that must be saved. All this adds up to more documents to be reviewed.

All of the aforementioned growth is occurring despite the technological advancements that may decrease the need for live lawyers to do the document review. Technology assisted review programs such as predictive coding utilize people and technology to automatically tag documents as responsive, non-responsive or privileged. Such technology has been widely used in other industries for decades, but the legal industry has been reluctant to accept it.

Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck of the Southern District of New York issued a decision in DaSilva Moore approving the use of predictive coding in the discovery process. Although a district court judge is permitting the plaintiff to challenge Judge Peck’s ruling, the magistrate judge’s decision was the first court-ordered sanction of predictive coding.

E-discovery and document review is also growing in Israel. Exact Legal Review opened its doors at the end of 2011 to provide legal document review by U.S. attorneys at offshore prices. For more information, contact Jonathan Easton at 718-487-9896 or via email.