Ten Positive Signs of Life for the E-Discovery Document Review Industry

In the last year, a major law firm has been slapped with a lawsuit for sloppy document review work by their legal process outsourcing company. A state court has approved the use of predictive coding for electronic discovery. In addition, a U.S. District Court has affirmed a magistrate judge's order to employ predictive coding for the large amount of documents to be analyzed during discovery.

In sum, one might perceive the news report as rather gloomy for the e-discovery document review industry. Nevertheless, business is booming and there are a lot of reasons to celebrate.

Following (not in any order) are ten positive signs of life

1. QuisLex, a player in the legal process outsourcing industry, announced the opening of a brand new 25,000 square foot execution center in Hyderabad, India. This new office is an addition to their existing locations in U.S. and India. QuisLex declares that the expansion is in response to increasing client demand.

2. According to TechNavio, the legal process outsourcing market in India will grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 27.7% in the period 2010-2014. It is determined that a driving force behind the market growth is favorable government policies.

3. Tower Legal Solutions, a legal staffing and managed review company based in New York City, recently announced the addition of its 10,000 square foot cutting edge document review center in Charlotte, South Carolina. In addition to accommodating 300 document reviewers, the new facility will house Tower Legal's internal staff.

4. A leading e-discovery solutions company, DW Legal, expanded its Chicago document review facilities last month to add 15,000 square feet of space. The increased space enables DW Legal to employ additional attorneys and support staff for document review projects.

5. Excelerate Discovery, one of the top providers of electronic discovery services, announced the introduction of Japanese Language Document Review Services as part of its portfolio of services.

6. Gallivan, Gallivan and O'Melia (GGO, LLC), who has been a leader for 10 years in providing e-discovery solutions, recently announced the expansion of its UK facilities. Growing demands for e-discovery services and hosted document review fueled the growth as GGO's projects and volume of data doubled within one year of opening its London operation in 2011.

7. Last month, UnitedLex announced that it projects to close its financial year with $45 million in revenue - a growth of 80% over last year.

8. IBISWorld forecasts that the law firms industry, which is now worth $281 billion, will grow by 2.8% per year to 2016.

9. SochaGelbmann Surveys reports the e-discovery industry grew at a CAGR of 34.4% from 2002 to 2010.

10. Across the globe, legal process outsourcing is expected to grow to a $1.3 billion market by 2015. The LPO industry in India is expected to employ 18,000 professionals and post an annual revenue of $960 million by the end of 2015.

Additional positive signs of life may be found in Israel, where new companies such as Legal Writing Services and Exact Legal Review are offering an outsourcing alternative to India. Israel possesses a large pool of English speaking, U.S. educated and U.S. licensed attorneys who can provide U.S. quality legal work at offshore prices.

For more information about outsourcing your next litigation document review or due diligence review project, email Jonathan Easton at jonathan@exactlegalreview.com or call +972-52-769-9858.

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Social Networking and E-Discovery

Whenever there is a legal case there is always a discovery period before it starts so that evidence can be gathered. E-discovery does exactly that, only it uses information taken from digital formats. This can be anything from e-mails to searching for data stored on Cloud servers. There are no boundaries to what they can extract as long as they get the necessary legal documents to allow them to get this information.

E-discovery is particularly interested in gathering information from many different communication mediums we use on a daily basis. This means e-mails, instant messaging, phone calls, and of course using social networking sites.

They have particularly been focusing their efforts on social networking sites as this has proven to be a very popular way for people to communicate with each other. It also means that they are important because sometimes incriminating information can be found very easily. Also websites like Facebook incorporate themselves into users' mobile phones so when they sign in their exact geographic position is recorded.

The latest of these networking sites that has drawn attention to e-discovery is twitter. This site is very good for communicating and a lot of demonstrations and rallies have been put together using this website. In fact just recently it has proven crucial in the United Kingdom when e-discovery played an important role using information from twitter to prosecute people who were involved in the recent 2011 London rioting.

It does not matter where you are in the world or what legal system you have e-discovery will be able to cross boundaries and gets the courts subpoenas it needs to gather information for defense or for prosecution.

Whenever there is discovery to be made, social networking sites are now a major consideration for e-discovery teams. They will include this in their research and check and individual Facebook or Twitter accounts to check if any incriminating evidence has been communicated through these mediums. This is extremely beneficial to both governments and individuals who are taking cases to court. In a lot of criminal cases they get caught because they have provided crucial evidence of assets and also communications that were related to a particular event. The reason is because many people cannot help but boast and brag about what they have done and also how many assets they have received from it.

E-discovery can make any case clear cut by gathering crucial evidence and putting it in a form that is submitted to a court. They have experienced members on their team that can extract information from all sorts of devices and servers. E-discovery is playing a crucial part in legal discovery and in the future will probably be used more and more in legal proceedings as the technology continues to progress.

This article was written by Bradley Morton, he is a law student interested in the legal discovery process and hoping to one day be an attorney. He believes that technology has the power to revolutionize legal proceedings, through things like electronic discovery.

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