No algorithms were harmed in the making of this report!* The 2024 State of the Industry Report is out! Here’s how to get it!

These days, it seems that you have to make it clear “who” the writer is – for anything! With the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022, generative AI became the thing to talk about – in society and in legal technology. Generative AI is not the “elephant in the room”, it’s the “elephant herd in the room”! It can even officiate a wedding or diagnose the cause of a boy’s pain (after 17 doctors failed to do so). And it can also “hallucinate”, facilitate cyberattacks and get sued (again and again). Fasten your seatbelts!

2023 also marked a “return to normalcy” regarding in-person activities – in terms of working in the office and attending in-person conferences and other events. Even though Covid is still here, governments have declared the end to the public health emergency that existed for over 3 years, which means talking about it is “old news”. Spoiler alert!

For those of us in the eDiscovery industry, the generative AI “elephant” is in our room as well. eDiscovery providers have been rushing to update their offerings to include large language model (LLM)/generative AI capabilities, with many announced and some beginning to be actively used! We’re barely out of the gate in this horse race and nowhere near the home stretch!

Is the landscape changing for eDiscovery? That’s what we’re here to find out in the 2024 State of the Industry Report at eDiscovery Today!

eDiscovery Today launched its fourth annual State of the Industry Report Survey on October 23rd, which (once again) consisted of ten questions and concluded it on December 10th.  And 444 of you responded – 34 more than last year! We’re gonna need a bigger boat! Here are some of the highlights from your responses:

• The breakdown of respondents was Software or Service Provider (42.8%), Law Firm (22.3%), Consultancy (20.7%), Corporation (8.8%), Government Entity (2.7%) and Other (2.7%). About five out of six respondents (83.6%) were from the US.
• The number of respondents for Law Firms, Software/Service Providers, Consultancies and Corporations have enabled me to break out the responses among those four demographics, so you can see how each segment has responded to the survey questions.
• Close to two-thirds of respondents (63.7%) have experimented with the free version of ChatGPT! And even more than that (64.9%) are reading and researching about genAI technology and its capabilities and challenges!
• Nearly a quarter of respondents (23.9%) expect generative AI & LLM technology to have a transformative effect for eDiscovery – this year! And almost three-quarters of respondents (73.2%) expect it to at least create new workflows in 2024!
• 30.1% of respondents use predictive coding in all or most of their cases, but 27.8% of respondents use it in very few or none of their cases. Does that reflect an increase or decrease in usage compared to last year’s survey? Find out in the report!
• Discovery of data from mobile devices or collaboration apps? 40.2% of respondents discover mobile devices in all/most of their cases, while 19.0% of respondents do in very few/none of their cases. For collaboration apps, it’s 37.9% and 18.9% respectively.
• There are also cumulative and breakdown results for number of respondents using eDiscovery for different use cases, the biggest eDiscovery related trend for 2024 (with a new trend at the top for the first time!) and the eDiscovery challenge not being talked about enough!

As always, there’s a second component to the State of the Industry report. I also reached out to several industry thought leaders with questions about each of these survey areas and I have also included their observations* to add some additional perspective on these notable topics and trends as we head into 2024. Hopefully, this provides a unique perspective from the industry as a whole and from the thought leader community!

So, how do you get the 45-page 2024 State of the Industry report? If you are currently an email follower of the blog, or if you completed the survey, you will be receiving a link to the report later today or tomorrow. If you’re not currently an email follower of the blog, you can get a FREE copy of the report (and any report eDiscovery Today publishes) simply by following the blog via email. To follow eDiscovery Today, enter your email address at the top of the right sidebar where it says “Follow Blog via Email” to receive the report as well as emails with links to new posts. It’s that easy!

Thanks to Mary Mack, Kaylee Walstad and the EDRM team for your support and sponsorship to promote the 2024 State of the Industry Report!

So, what do you think? Are you surprised by any of the survey results above? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

*Except for the graphics, which were created by GPT-4’s Image Creator Powered by DALL-E. 🙂

**Observations expressed in this report by thought leaders are their own and do not represent views of their employers, clients or partners.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, 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.