It’s not Thanksgiving yet, but it’s never too early for your annual helping of the mashed potato graphic that means it’s also time for the eDiscovery Market Size Mashup that Rob Robinson compiles and presents on his Complex Discovery site each year.

It’s become an annual tradition for Rob to release it earlier and earlier each year, and, this year, he released his worldwide eDiscovery services and software overview for 2020 to 2025 on November 10, two days earlier than last year.

This is the ninth(!) year I’ve covered the “mashup” and we can continue to gauge how accurate those first predictions were.  This year, I can look at the original estimate for 2020 with a look back at the estimates for 2015-2020 here.

Of course, 2020 is no ordinary year and, recently, Rob reset the baseline to reduce the estimates for 2020 to account for the “unanticipated pandemeconomic-driven retraction in eDiscovery spending during 2020” (I covered that update here).  So, keep that in mind when comparing against previous estimates.

Taken from a combination of public market sizing estimations as shared in leading electronic discovery publications, posts, data points and discussions (sources listed on Complex Discovery), the following eDiscovery Market Size Mashup shares general market sizing estimates for the software and services area of the electronic discovery market for the years between 2020 and 2025.

Here are some highlights (based on the estimates from the compiled sources on Rob’s site):

• The eDiscovery Software and Services market is expected to grow an estimated 6.79% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) per year from 2020 to 2025 from $10.89 billion to $15.12 billion per year.  Services will comprise approximately 63% of the market and software will comprise approximately 37% by 2025.
• The eDiscovery Software market is expected to grow at an estimated 11.14% CAGR per year from $3.30 billion in 2020 to $5.60 billion in 2025.  In 2020, software comprises 30.3% of the market and, by 2025, approximately 66% of the eDiscovery software market is expected to be “off-premise” – a.k.a. cloud and other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)/Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)/Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions.
• The eDiscovery Services market is expected to grow at an estimated 4.65% CAGR per year from 2020 to 2025 from $7.59 billion to $9.53 billion per year.  The breakdown of the services market by 2025 is expected to be as follows: 63% review, 19% processing and 18% collection.

If we look at the original “mashup” that we covered for 2020-2025, the original eDiscovery Software and Services market estimate for 2020 was $13.60 billion, the original Software portion of the estimate was $3.85 billion and the original Services portion of the estimate was $9.75 billion.  So, the original software estimate was understated at .55 billion, while the original services estimate was understated by 2.16 billion.  Overall, that’s an understatement of 2.71 billion.  Not a surprise, considering the adjustments necessary to correct for the pandemic and correlated economic downturn.

A couple of other notable stats:

• The U.S. constitutes approximately 62% of worldwide eDiscovery software and services spending in 2020, with that number decreasing to approximately 57% by 2025.
• Governmental and Regulatory spending on eDiscovery (audits, investigations, and litigation) is estimated to constitute approximately 47% of worldwide eDiscovery software and services spending in 2020, with that number decreasing to approximately 42% by 2025.

So, what do you think?  Do any of these numbers surprise you?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the authors and speakers themselves, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.