Electronic discovery: not just emails any more ...

Last week Symantec released the findings of its 2011 Information Retention and eDiscovery survey. This looked at how legal and IT personnel within enterprises are managing ever-growing volumes of electronically stored information and preparing for e-discovery requests. Through the survey is said to have been conducted among the legla and IT personnel of some 2,000 enterprises worldwide, it has a bit of an American flavour to it. According to the survey:

"• Email is no longer the primary source of information for e-discovery requests, and companies now must be prepared to produce information from more sources than ever before, with more than half indicating SharePoint files (51 percent), and nearly half citing instant messages and text messages (44 percent) and social media (41 percent) as most commonly part of an e-discovery request 

• Implementing best practices translates to a 64 percent faster response time with a 2.3 times higher success rate when responding to an eDiscovery request 

• Despite the risks, the survey found nearly half of respondents do not have an information retention plan in place, which leads to serious problems related to excess storage and improper legal hold practices".

There's plenty more information in the Symantec media release, as one might expect.

PatLit notes that regardless of the excellence of a company's best practices, not merely the discovery of electronic documents but the post-discovery processing of them is bound to be increase the cost of patent litigation in those countries which provide for discovery as against those that do not.

Do any readers have interesting experiences of electronic discovery issues which they'd like to share?