Wortzmans’ Annual Crystal Ball – Predictions for 2017

Time again to dust off our crystal ball and give you our guaranteed[1] predictions of what you will see happening in e-discovery in 2017:

1. The Cloud
We have already started seeing a move away from on-premise e-discovery installations. With kCura’s recent move to hosting on Microsoft Azure, combined with Microsoft’s rollout of Canadian data centres earlier this year, we expect to see more law firms ditching their current in-house installations and moving to cloud based e-discovery software.

2. More Options for Canada
We predict a greater acceptance that cloud based software is just as secure, if not more secure, than in-house installations. We have been told by several south-of-the-border e-discovery software vendors that they have plans to launch Canadian data centre hosted installations in the coming year. We can’t divulge who they are (that would spoil the surprise), but look for more options next year.

3. More Discovery Plans  
The OBA Civil Litigation group has prepared a paper questioning the value of the current rules relating to discovery plans. We see an increasing need for effective discovery planning. E-discovery is not going away as data volumes increase. Different forms of communication are developed all the time.  As awareness of discovery plans and their usefulness for even small cases increases, more and more lawyers will start to use them, and start discussing scope and exchange of documents sooner, exactly the purpose of the discovery plan.

4. Better Search  
Although keywords will remain the dominant form for searching for relevant information, we expect to see better workflow surrounding keyword searches, and more use of other search technologies, such as conceptual categorization, assisted review, and machine learning. We are already past the adoption curve, and 2017 will be the year TAR becomes mainstream in Canada.

5. Better Organization  
Information Governance has become a catch phrase. Most boards now discuss how they can better govern their information. While the growth has mainly been due to an increased awareness in cybersecurity, e-discovery will benefit from better organization of the information and less ROT to sift through to find what we need.
 
After a couple of years of lackluster innovation and somewhat slow growth, we expect 2017 to be a watershed year for e-discovery in Canada.


[1] We guarantee that our predictions might or might not come true