The Many Benefits of E-Discovery: Page 2 of 3

E-discovery and GRC: With the SEC finally coming down hard on public companies, compliance managers desperately need a way to return data results fast in response to investigations. Regulatory compliance is not the only driver here, as internal governance and due diligence e-discovery needs also figure strongly in this segment.

E-discovery and IT: Collection-based e-discovery development impacts IT in two ways -- it enables them to help Legal and GRC collect and review huge masses of ESI, and it can help IT directly to manage storage by automating retention schedules. This depends on a given e-discovery product's capabilities of course, but including automated data movement policies is a common feature.

To get to this place, corporations are increasingly forming interdisciplinary teams to research services and products that will help them corral e-discovery for litigation and compliance, and increasingly for data lifecycle management. Going forward, we believe that litigation will remain the most significant pain point. But compliance also benefits directly from e-discovery-driven development and is not far behind. And IT can make use of some "collection" e-discovery offerings to manage storage -- a highly leveraged use of e-discovery technology.

Christine Taylor, an analyst with the Taneja Group, has more than a decade of experience in covering the IT and communications industries. She has written extensively on the role of technology in e-discovery, compliance and governance, and information management.

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