Holiday season is taking the center stage and everyone is busy making it the most joyous and memorable and legals are no exception. I am writing the last piece of the year and looking forward to some trends in 2025.
Before I jump on the trends to watch in 2025, let me share a surprising stat with you. While reading Ella Sherman’s summary on the 17th annual Law Department Operation Survey, I found that 62 percent of in-house legal professionals either mostly disagreed or strongly disagreed that their law firms are innovative. Their obvious expectation from the firms is Gen AI, 78% of survey respondents are encouraging their law firms to adopt Gen-AI (in hope of cutting down the costs). On the other side, we hear from the law firms’ folks that their clients are reluctant or technophobic. They are extra cautious about the data’s sensitivity and confidentiality.
So what’s your take on it? Are they really into the adoption race?
Nope. I believe all are playing at their own pace and capacity and have already achieved a few milestones in 2024. And, many more to come.
The reason why I picked up “eDiscovery” among many other workflows impacting legals is that eDiscovery is considered one of the most complex, expensive, and ever challenging workflows. Here, technology has a wider canvas for innovation and making eDiscovery more simple, cost-effective, and impactful.
eDiscovery: Top 3 trends to watch in 2025
Gen-AI – The obvious future!
Year 2024 could be considered a year of early adopters but in 2025, it will become household terms for legal professionals. Roughly 67 percent eDiscovery professionals participated in Fall 2024 eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey by ComplexDiscovery have either already deployed Gen-AI or are testing it in a pilot run. so, organizations are no longer questioning whether AI belongs in eDiscovery but how best to implement it effectively, according to the survey. In-house legal’s expectation from this transformative tech is simply efficiency and cost-reduction.
eDiscovery teams (at law firms, ALSPs, and eDiscovery service providers) should assess the Gen-AI capabilities of their existing vendor and if not promising, has to start exploring AI-enabled eDiscovery solutions.
Document Review – remains the jewel in the crown!
Despite having a tremendous potential of AI-innovation in this document review phase in eDiscovery, it will be there as a key cost contributor in 2025 and one of the most time-consuming and humanized compared to other stages of eDiscovery. Considering the rapidly growing volume of data, eDiscovery team will consider AI as a first-level reviewer. AI has already made its way in the privilege side of the review, the two most common use cases for automating review are Responsive Vs Non Responsive and Privileged Vs Non-Privileged.
eDiscovery Costs – still and will drive the decision in vendor selection!
List of features, integrated AI-assist, and top-notch service guarantee are struggling to win the contract. Cost is the ultimate motivation for eDiscovery technology buyers (be it a law-firm or corporate legal or service providers). I have observed several hyper-active discussions on Reddit about tech vendors’ decisions of discontinuing on-premise offerings or retiring support/update for old customers. Some of the enterprise companies with hundreds of active matters each with several TBs data size is in search of a vendor who offers an eDiscovery solution on-premise with no cap on # users or data volume. In addition to the costs, law firms and in-house legal teams are also concerned about the privacy and security of the data (especially in highly sensitive matters). Data residency obligations under privacy regulations (i.e. GDPR) can’t be overlooked.
Wrapping up:
eDiscovery is a name of the technology which evolves with time and needs. Adoption of any new innovative technologies are largely affected by accuracy in results, transparency in methodologies, and cost of upgradation. Have a wonderful year ahead.
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