In the United States, companies worth over $1 billion are handling about 147 lawsuits. That’s more good news for lawyers, but it’s also good news for the data storage and electronic discovery industry that manages and scrounges up data among petabytes of information.
AP Technology Writer Brain Bergstein points out that the entire Internet Archive totals one petabyte. The value of a company being able to store and sift through that data is immense, especially in a litigation-centric environment where corporations like Enron (and more scrupulous ones) are called on to release the goods for court.
Growing at about 35 percent a year, the overall electronic discovery market is now worth nearly $2 billion.
“Nothing’s in the file cabinets anymore,” Michele Lange, staff attorney for legal technologies at electronic discovery center Kroll Ontrack Inc., told the AP. She was referring to the increased usage of email and instant messenger over paper memos.
Add in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 requiring strict archival practices and you now have a legal necessity to add to the practical.
Since the infamous Enron scandal, offshoots of traditional electronic discovery ends have arisen (perhaps for publicity for a product) that allow anyone to search the Enron’s email archives. Enron emails were released by the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission.
Websites have been established for the sole purpose of allowing Web browsers to dig through the email of the guilty as well as the innocent.
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