Today, legal teams deal with many data types from multiple sources—and the data amounts to much more than they need. In part, that’s because the cost of storing data is plummeting, and because mining data has numerous business benefits. Companies keep their data on the principle that it might someday be beneficial. But they’re also aware that much of the data they’re holding onto is likely useless, because it’s obsolete, redundant or trivial. However, standard data management practices make it difficult and expensive to weed out the relevant data, which is a big problem.

Data volumes are growing exponentially, yet the proportion of useful to nonuseful data is still approximately 1:9. It doesn’t help that data comes from more diverse sources than ever. For example, collaboration apps such as Slack, Zoom and Teams are now significant data repositories that might be relevant in litigation, investigations, audits, data subject access requests, and more.