eDiscovery and Search – a $42.1 Billion Problem

According to Robert Hilson, Director at Logikull, a discovery automation platform company, in his recent blog, ‘How much does eDiscovery cost the US every year? He calculated the costs of eDiscovery, and the result is mind boggling. Don’t care about eDiscovery? I bet your legal department does. It’s a great read and really brings home the startling costs.

I associate much of the costs with poor search results, resulting in an inordinate amount of time to manually ensure accuracy. We are not a vendor of any type of legal or eDiscovery software, but we are a vendor of search (no this isn’t a product pitch). Search should be a high value, fundamental application in all organizations. It isn’t. One of my sales guys told me the other day it’s a matter of ROI. I call it a lack of upper management education on the very wide impact poor search is to an organization. Or should I say poor metadata? Or lastly, a poor salesman?

Many articles I read indicate that the legal industry is very keen on machine learning. Microsoft is betting a lot on that pony too. Looking at the costs of eDiscovery, I’d be pretty desperate for a better search solution. Do you think machine learning is the new solution to solve search problems? Maybe it’s time has come after 62 years. You can’t escape metadata – it’s everywhere. Even in machine learning. I still say it is the fundamental problem of far too many applications. What do you think?