BDO's Annual E-Discovery Survey

Today I participated in a webinar presented by Duke Law School's EDRM entitled, "Inside BDO's E-Discovery & Beyond Survey: Lessons for Inside Counsel and Law Firms". See a report on the survey posted here. The speakers were George Socha of BDO; Robert Keeling, a partner with Sidley Austin LLP; and James Waldron, the director of the EDRM.

BDO USA, LLP, an accounting and consulting network, asked 148 in-house counsel a set of 16 questions about how their business handle electronic discovery; cybersecurity; data privacy and information governance.

The following, for me, were the key highlights of the presentation:

• 48% of the surveyed businesses are using Technology Assisted Review

• There was a jump in businesses who listed 'Big Data' as one of their top three e-discovery issues from 28% in 2017 to 47% in 2018.

• Half of the respondents did not have an information governance committee.

• Nearly half of the surveyed businesses put their CIO in charge of their information governance program, and only 17% had a separate chief information governance officer, with only 1% putting her or him in charge of the program.

• 63% of respondents said that they planned to invest in cybersecurity risk assessment in the next 12 months, 48% in incident response planning; and 37% in cyber insurance.

• 71% planned to spend the same amount on e-discovery next year, and only 23% planned to spend more.

• 42% planned an increase in their information governance budget, while 53% will maintain their current budget.