"Generally, any company with $1B in revenue faces multiple legal matters concurrently. They may be spurious, or legitimate - but for good-sized companies, they're inevitable. What's notable is that those companies spend between $2.5 million and $4 million a year on legal discovery of electronic files alone.
"What's driving those costs? Part of it is an increase in the number of lawsuits. Part of it is the new regulations that enterprises have to comply with in the wake of Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco. But probably the most important factor driving the increase in legal discovery costs is the rapid growth of electronic data generated and stored by companies as part of their ongoing business operations. While technology has made our lives at work easier and more productive, it has also contributed to the proliferation of electronically stored information (ESI). To make things more complicated, as much as 90% of all that information is unstructured and unmanaged. Most companies do not have well-defined information management policies in place to manage the explosive growth of these data. This is a recipe that can lead to huge litigation costs later for companies when they have to reactively dig through mountains of information to provide timely responses for eDiscovery requests." Proactive eDiscovery
