From INFOcus:
From its advent fifteen years ago with the growth of word processing and email, the eDiscovery industry has evolved substantially and not unlike many other relatively similar technology industries like internet security and networking, from birth as a subset of the much older discovery process (which eDiscovery has come to dominate) through childhood and adolescence and into adulthood. So just how “old” is eDiscovery? And where is it headed from here?
Using these ancillary industries as guideposts offers some salient comparisons, albeit on an expedited basis as technological innovations continue to accelerate change inside and outside of the workplace – a byproduct of Moore’s law which produces exponential advances in all things related to computing hardware (which is almost everything these days). At the risk of oversimplifying things, we have divided the life of eDiscovery into 4 distinct stages and equated each to the human lifespan: infancy/childhood, adolescence/teenage years, adulthood, and what we’ll respectfully call “seniority.” Using these admittedly crude demarcations, we believe eDiscovery is in the process of graduating from college, full of promise and ready to “get serious”, but not quite sure what it will become when it grows up.
