A Day in the Life of the Internet May be a Nightmare for eDiscovery and Information Governance

Our daily life increasingly revolves around blog posts, emails, and status updates. The folks at mbaonline provide a snapshot of what happens in one day on the Internet.

Some of the statistics are almost hard to beleive.  As an example,  we send 294 billion emails everyday.  And, we spend 4.7 million minutes on Facebook and upload 250 million photos everyday.

What were we doing with that 4.7 million minutes before Facebook?  And, of course the big question is how is the pre-occupation with social media impacting productivity. That's all interesting.  But, the topic of my post today is about eDiscovery and Information Governance.
Following is a summary of this snapshot:

• In one day, enough information is consumed to fill 168 million DVDs
• 294 billion emails are sent
• 2 million blog posts are written
• 173 million different people visit Facebook
• 4.7 million minutes are spent on Facebook (what were people during before?)
• 250 million photos are uploaded to Facebook
• 22 million hours of old TV shows and movies are watched on Netflix
• 846,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube
• 18.7 million hours of music is streamed through Pandora
• 35 million apps are downloaded to mobile devices

As an analyst of the eDiscovery and Information Governance market, each of these statistics indicates to me that we have only seen the tip of the iceberg in regards to the volume of Electronically Stored Information (ESI) and potentially relevant legal evidence that will need to be indentified, collected, processed (normalized), analyzed and produced.

My conclusion is that the eDiscovery and Information Governance market is and is going to continue to be an extremely interesting place to work.  And, it is going to be an industry that is going to have to accelerate its use of technology as there are not enough lawyers and paralegals in the world to manually review all of this ESI and potentially responsive evidence.

Click Here for a link to the original article and graphic.