Table of Contents
- Summary
- Market Categories and Deployment Types
- Key Criteria Comparison
- GigaOm Radar
- Vendor Insights
- Analyst’s Take
- Methodology
- About Sue Clarke
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
Organizations can face litigation or discovery requests under regulations like GDPR at any time. Discovery must be undertaken in a timely fashion, and the ability to undertake an early case assessment (ECA) will allow counsel and courts to determine whether a matter is worth pursuing or if a settlement should be sought.
Without an e-discovery solution, it’s time consuming and expensive to find the right assets among the millions of items that enterprises have stored. Often, the volume of the final dataset is not known at the start of the project, and so-called “smoking guns,” or relevant items of information that no one knew existed, may be discovered during litigation, landing the organization in trouble and resulting in larger settlements.
For that reason, it’s in the best interest of organizations to have an e-discovery solution already in place when a request is received. This proactive measure allows organizations the time to properly compare solutions well before the need for one becomes critical, ensuring they invest in a solution that best meets their requirements.
E-discovery solutions accelerate the search for and retrieval of assets. The increasing use of automation for tasks such as review, redaction, and tagging reduces the manual effort required and helps deliver depositions to opposing counsel, a court, or regulator in a shorter time frame. By helping organizations to address access requests and prepare for litigation more quickly, e-discovery solutions can also reduce the cost of the e-discovery process.
E-discovery solutions follow the electronic discovery reference model (EDRM), a framework that defines all of the stages of e-discovery, from identifying the data to presenting it to a court. Some solutions provide end-to-end capabilities, while others stick to either the initial stages (identification, preservation, collection, and processing) or the later stages of the model (review, analysis, production, and presentation).
There are two distinct audiences that e-discovery software must support: organizations that undertake the initial searches for data that may be relevant to a matter and legal teams—either legal departments within large enterprises or law firms—responsible for reviewing and putting together the final dataset of content.
This GigaOm Radar report highlights key e-discovery vendors and equips IT decision-makers with the information needed to select the best fit for their business and use case requirements. In the corresponding GigaOm report “Key Criteria for Evaluating E-Discovery Solutions,” we describe in more detail the capabilities and metrics that are used to evaluate vendors in this market.
This is our second year evaluating the e-discovery space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. All solutions included in this Radar report meet the following table stakes—capabilities widely adopted and well implemented in the sector:
- Search multiple repositories and sources
- Audit logging
- Optical character recognition
- Data governance
- Case management
- User management
How to Read this Report
This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding, consider reviewing the following reports:
Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.
GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.