FTW: Pro-eDiscovery For The Win

Check out this recent announcement by the State of Florida. Adam Sand, eDiscovery guru, covers it in this post on The Modern Archivist. He makes some good points on the general direction in which eDiscovery is going, namely that there are more and more sources of data which are being considered to be relevant, and social media sits right on the the same frontier that email and other electronically stored information (ESI) only a few years ago. This relates directly to the Technology Adoption Curve, something I vaguely remember from my days at Wharton: 

• Innovators tend to be more educated and prosperous, with a greater tolerance for risk
• Early adopters are younger, educated, and active in the community
• Early majority are more conservative, but open to new ideas and influential within the community
• Late majority may be older, less educated, conservative, and less socially active
• Laggards are highly conservative, oldest and least educated. They often are less prosperous and more risk averse

In terms of eDiscovery and total information governance, I think we are looking at a major reset in the business over the last few years. Although there have been many point solutions to handle the EDRM model, there have exist few truly all-encompassing solutions that can take a company from the information management side to production and move seamlessly back and forth (please refer to the EDRM model below). The move from Reactive eDiscovery to Proactive eDiscovery has changed the landscape of the business.

What this fundamental reset means is that we've seen a reboot in the Technology Adoption Curve. I believe that we are somewhere in the Innovator/Early Adopter phase for this space, namely because what we are seeing in the market are that companies like Cisco and Wells Fargo actively looking to upgrade their eDiscovery technologies to the best available proactive solutions. These are the same companies that are willing to take the time investment to become educated, and lead their industries in risk management. Once the Innovators and Early Adopters begin to the raise awareness and the government continues to add pressure (see my post on HR 1387 or Steve Chan's post here), we will see enough examples to propel the proactive industry to the real meat of the bell curve. 

Inside legal counsels should be aware that this is the curve of the future. Proactive eDiscovery means being prepared for litigation like companies never had the capability of being before. And we all know that the key to success (and winning) is all in the preparation. Being a laggard is simply too risky.