New Gadget 2011

Respondents to a recent unscientific survey on e-Discovery indicated that they were particularly interested in adding e-Discovery support for cloud applications and social media in their organizations, but that they typically did not think that their organization was prepared to perform e-Discovery in the cloud. In addition, they seemed more interested in monitoring potential legal challenges from social media than they did in controlling their employees� use of social media in the first place. The survey was performed by Clearwell Systems, which was recently purchased by Symantec Corp., and in conjunction with the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) analyst firm.
Only 25 percent of respondents considered themselves prepared to handle e-Discovery requests inside the cloud, with 30 percent indicating that they reported cloud applications "in-scope" for e-Discovery in 2010 and 60 percent anticipating the discovery of cloud-based applications in 2011. Thirty-seven percent have no defined policy, while 18 percent have no agreement with their cloud provider. This is a problem because, when user organizations first set up agreements with cloud providers, they are more interested in putting the information into the cloud and don�t think so much about how to retrieve it, says Katey Wood, an analyst in information management for ESG. Similarly, cloud vendors encourage users to put more data in the cloud but don�t have an incentive to give the data back, with the result that user organizations don�t have custody and control of the data and yet they are still considered responsible for it, she says. In addition, it can be difficult to work with, noting that one can download a Gmail mailbox but it doesn�t maintain conversational threads, she said.
Similarly, while 27 percent of respondents considered social media in-scope for e-Discovery in 2010, 58 percent said they considered it in-scope for 2011, with 79 percent being interested in Facebook, 64 percent being interested in Twitter, and 55 percent being interested in LinkedIn. This result actually surprised Wood because not all companies are using social media, and that some companies didn�t appear to have any sort of policy around it, she said.
E-Discovery is also becoming much more prevalent and common in user organizations, with 8 percent of survey respondents identifying themselves as the "e-Discovery Director," a burgeoning role, says Hilary McQuaide, marketing communications manager for the Mountain View, Calif.-based company.
The survey consisted of 20 questions developed by ESG, and Clearwell collected respondents at events such as computer trade shows, while ESG performed analysis on the results. However, because the respondent population was not randomly selected, there is a limit to the reliability of the test results. For example, while 93 percent of respondents indicated that they planned to bring e-Discovery in-house rather than by outsourcing the functionality, one might be more likely to expect such a response from people attending a trade show, who perhaps were researching e-Discovery software, acknowledged Wood, who noted that it can be difficult to get e-Discovery users to respond to a survey because it�s such a nascent industry, she said.
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