In 2006, Wired magazine published an article about the advent of the e-discovery industry. In it, the author notes that many e-discovery vendors at the time provided very similar services—harvesting electronically-stored information (ESI), electronically de-duplicating the data, then posting it for attorney review in, what was then, a select number of web-accessible document review platforms. The author later notes that many in the fledgling industry anticipated that cost-conscious corporate entities would eventually replace law firms as the direct clients of these providers. Further, experts also projected that software manufacturers or developers, along with large tech-services companies, would soon begin to build e-discovery-related functionality like in-place preservation and issuance of litigation holds in their products. Nearly 13 years on, now, and it is hard to decide what is more interesting about the article—the serious accuracy of the predictions, or the amount of time it took them to come to fruition.

In January 2019, Zapproved LLC—interestingly, a company whose product line and core competency grew directly out of the trends predicted in that Wired article—noted in “The Future is Now: Predictions for Corporate E-discovery in 2019,” two very significant trends that will have a lasting impact on the e-discovery provider business model that evolved out of the early 2000s: corporations will be more diligent about data deletion; and corporations will continue to move more of their e-discovery tasks in-house. The primary drivers noted are not new—costs of maintaining, collecting and preserving ever-growing volumes of data, coupled with the risks and implications that loom with sanctions for any number of ESI-related pitfalls. These trends will have four major impacts on law firms and e-discovery service providers:

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