The process of eDiscovery does not only bring problems of compliance, storage and access to corporate council but also causes Law Firms (the entities digesting this information) problems when trying to search, retrieve and access this data.  Recently, Law Firms have seen a huge increase in costs associated with handling cases.  These administrative costs have caused IT departments, litigation departments, number of vendors and outsource service partners to increase dramatically.

For IT personnel it is the hiring not only the Director of IT or CIO but it is the direct reports such as the Document Management Administrator, Content Management Administrator, Records Personnel, among others that are causing administrative budgets to swoon for law firms.  One would think that as technology improves there would be cost synergies involved and ultimately law firms could reduce staff and increase efficiency.  In fact the sheer amount of data and compliance related issues bring about huge demands on law firms which is why specialized departments Litigation Support (think Paralegal meets IT) are growing at an even faster rate.  These departments can handle a wide variety of tasks such as vendor management, records management, outsourced services management as well as tagging and producing metadata about relevant documents that lawyers eventually introduce as evidence.