Would you settle a lawsuit to avoid the cost of e-discovery?

Apparently, 1 in 5 companies have already.

I’m surprised it’s this high already, just one year after the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were amended, which made all relevant electronically stored information discoverable. I thought certainly, over time, we’d see some of this, especially with small companies that don’t have the IT resources to properly identify, search, and produce ESI. I didn’t imagine it was already happening at this rate.

This is only going to get worse, unless companies start to get control of their document and email storage. I wonder if we’ll start to see a bit of a regression of Web 2.0 technologies. After all, the promise of “work anywhere and have access to your data”, may get undercut by the inability to locate all the various places that data may be stored when it comes time to deal with e-discovery. If your business has data stored online, or online access to email, that also means each of your users may have copies of that data on home PC’s, laptops, mobile devices, etc.

It will be interesting to see how companies find a balance between the two interests, and how much money email storage providers make in the process.

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