EDRM Trusted Partner, Everlaw, Releases Trends and Predictions Report

Everlaw, EDRM’s Trusted Partner, assessed and quantified the usage of their platform and generated statistics demonstrating current shifts and foreshadowing future shifts in eDiscovery community practices. The report, titled “Lighting the Way, 2021 Ediscovery Trends and Everlaw’s 2022 Predictions.

Remote work, generally centered around video Zoom and Teams meetings, contributed to a massive increase in transcribed audio/video files with only 38,000 hours of transcribed A/V files in 2020 compared with 133,000 hours in 2021.

Additional excerpts from the report, available here, are below:

• Remote work’s impact on redactions, security and cloud:
  • Redactions to preserve client security and confidentiality increased greatly from 2020 to 2021, especially with new media types, broken out by type below:
    • Image redactions: 3,095% increase
    • Spreadsheet redactions: 632% increase
    • Metadata redactions: 29% increase
    • Average #: 2,456% increase
  •  In 2021, 20% of all metadata redactions were suggested, implying that legal professionals are beginning to rely more on automated suggestions for routine legal work. 
• The ediscovery workplace is being used for virtual collaboration: Having the flexibility to customize your workspace is critical to easing the burden of legal work. 
  • Virtual communication between legal professionals is expanding. Everlaw saw a huge year-over-year increase in the number of in-platform messages sent. The number of in-platform messages has increased by 35%. 
• There was a big increase in the number of deposition transcripts uploaded to Storybuilder, Everlaw’s collaborative case-building tool, as well as the number of documents added to timelines. There was a 106% increase of deposition transcripts uploaded to Everlaw, and a 41% increase in the number of drafts created. Nearly 300,000 documents were added to Storybuilder timelines.

Download your copy of the report here.