IDC's 2009 Corporate eDiscovery Technology Trends Survey concludes that among the most litigious and highly regulated industries, average ESI collection volumes per matter are rising; At the same time, corporate eDiscovery technology budgets are flat or declining. The early results of the 2010 study  suggest a slight improvement in budgets; however, the ESI volume trends persist.  The corporate litigants' challenges greatly influenced the product and service priorities of the technology vendor community, and are reflected in the product announcements during LegalTech NYC 2010 (Feb 1-3).  This year, vendors announced solutions that address the corporate litigants' demands for cost efficiencies and for enhanced risk management and legal strategies.  These product releases target corporate litigants who want to take core e-discovery activities in-house and those who are rationalizing their technologies and service providers

Product announcements intended for corporate litigants with in-house eDiscovery initiatives include:

Early Case Assessment Applications. ECA  applications are an emerging product category that incorporates search and analytics capabilities with project and cost management and workflow automation. Vendors have been announcing their ECA solutions over the last 14 months. Search and content analytics vendors (such as StoredIQ), security forensics vendors (such as Guidance Software), and technology services vendors (like Fios) joined the fray and announced their own versions of ECA applications for data in distributed endpoints (servers, laptops, desktops, network file shares) and messaging systems (gateways and servers). Corporate legal teams and outside counsel employ these applications to document and automate the search and analysis of large volumes of potentially responsive unstructured data (both digital and paper based) to understand key facts and relationships pertinent to the litigation matter, identify and evaluate risks, evaluate options and develop the appropriate legal strategy, and leverage information to predict the costs of eDiscovery. Based on recent discussions with corporate eDiscovery project managers, the biggest adoption impediment will come from IT practitioners who are "married" to their forensic collection tools.

Cloud-based Legal Hold Solutions. Legal hold notification and life cycle management application vendors, Exterro and Zapproved, announced the first generation of their cloud-based service offerings, while Mimosa partnered with Navigant Consulting to offer a cloud-based integrated legal hold solution.

Exterro introduced Cloud Fusion to serve the needs of the mid-market and outside law firm. The initial offering is hosted at SAS-70 certified hosting partners. The architecture  physically partitions application and computing infrastructure for each law firm or mid-market client. The legal hold notification services and resources are logically partitioned (by matter or by client) within each physical partition (by law firm or corporate client). Over time, Exterro says that it plans to support a shared infrastructure across its law firm and corporate clients and extend the cloud-based offering to include the rest of the Fusion modules (data maps and ediscovery workflows).

Zapproved's Legal Hold Pro offers an on-demand litigation notification solution across multiple legal matter sizes, including single matters. Corporate litigants with small or one-off legal matters would be drawn to Legal Hold Pro's simple pricing model and easy to deploy solution. The vendor also announced a partnership with cloud-based email archiving provider, LiveOffice. Under the terms of the partnership, customers of LiveOffice eDiscovery Archives can purhase Legal Hold Pro as an add-on.

Mimosa, an archiving vendor, announced a strategic relationship with Navigant Consulting. Under the terms of the partnership, customers can employ Navigant's eDiscovery Portal for legal hold management and project tracking, to manage ESI in the Mimosa archives.

• Next Gen Ediscovery Appliances.  The appliance-based applications that are being introduced pack more punch than earlier generations, including enhanced functionalities, better scalability, and more processing capacity. Examples of appliance-based offerings include Autonomy's eDiscovery Appliance and Clearwell eDiscovery  Platform v5.5.  Autonomy's eDiscovery appliance combines legal hold management and early case assessment capabilities in a single appliance.  The Clearwell eDiscovery Platform v5.5 claims to process 1 TB per day and up to 100 million documents in a single appliance.

Corporate actions to take core eDiscovery activities in-house, explore alternative pricing arrangements, and rationalize service providers are compelling eDiscovery and litigation support vendors to offer creative solution bundles.  Examples include:

• FTI Technology's Acuity Integrated Document Review offers clients one predictable and fixed rate price for post-collection processing through review and production.  The offering bundles FTI's software and eDiscovery project management with attorney review, thus freeing up the client or outside counsel from the risk that comes with managing and orchestrating multiple activities across litigation support houses and contract review firms .
• Autonomy's chaining concept, where the core information management systems of the law firms and their clients are more tightly linked together through the use of analytics (powered by Autonomy's IDOL), is intended to foster closer collaboration.

Over the last 14 months, I came across a handful of serial litigants who are in the process of forming strategic relationships with their law firms and eDiscovery service providers.  These litigants are demanding their law firms to designate a group of lawyers (typically tech-savvy associates) to become experts in the client's information management and storage infrastructure practices. These litigants are also building up their technical capabilities to conduct eDiscovery in-house and are tracking process and cost metrics across core activities along the eDiscovery process chain. These litigants (who are primarily from the healthcare and energy industries) are using these metrics to rationalize their providers and negotiate better pricing and services terms with their vendors and law firms.  It appears that these trends are starting to trickle down from the most sophisticated serial litigants into the corporate mainstream. The solutions from FTI and Autonomy appear to be cognizant of these trends.

I will be closely watching the ability of these vendors to deliver on the promises of these announced solutions, especially those that claim to enable in-house eDiscovery capabilities.  I suspect that as companies become more mature, there will be specific types of litigation classes and content types where they will have the capabilities to do end-to-end in-house eDiscovery.  But the need for eDiscovery and litigation support service providers won't be completely obviated due to complex matters and the deployment of technologies in the corporate network.