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 A new survey of in-house counsel shows that managing mobile and social networking data is the No. 1 e-discovery issue they will face in the near future.

“This wasn’t a surprise to us,” Stephanie Giammarco told CorpCounsel.com. Giammarco is a partner in the New York office of BDO Consulting, where she leads the forensic technology services practice. “From the in-house counsel perspective, mobile and social networking is a challenge because of the lack of control they have over those data sources,” she added.

Managing networking data (22.5 percent) was followed by cost control (17.5 percent), new regulations (15 percent) and automating processes (12.5 percent) in “Inside E-Discovery Survey by BDO Consulting.”

The worry over new regulations includes the impact of the proposed Federal Rules of Civil Procedure on e-discovery, which are scheduled to be adopted next year.

The survey questioned 100 senior in-house counsel at leading corporations in the U.S. BDO, which provides advisory and tech services to businesses, will release the final survey report later this month, Giammarco said.

In addition, corporate counsel look for quality when selecting e-discovery providers, with 47.6 percent ranking quality as the most important factor, followed by 23.8 percent who ranked cost as most important, according to the survey.

Giammarco said she was “encouraged” by that finding. “It makes sense,” she said. “But to see the emphasis on quality was an indication that e-discovery is complex, and they want a solution and work product with a quality result.”

Other major survey findings include:

• Data privacy and security laws are the most significant cross-border e-discovery issues for in-house counsel who face increasingly complex multinational, multijurisdictional and multilingual data collection and review.
• Understanding all potentially responsive evidence early in the case and predicting the total cost both ranked as key factors.
• Most in-house counsel predict e-discovery spending will increase in the coming year.
• About a quarter of in-house counsel reported they have started to use new tools and technologies related to e-discovery.

“While many companies are using technology … the full potential of new and emerging tools is not yet being realized,” said Karen Schuler, BDO managing director.

Schuler added, “We expect the next few years will show further adoption of advanced tools and techniques, such as computer-assisted review, data analytics and data visualization” to reduce e-discovery costs, increase efficiency and aid litigation and investigation strategies.

In-House Counsel’s Big Worry: BYOD E-Discovery

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