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The Evolution of e-Discovery

By Bowe Kurowski
August 02, 2013

When Charles Darwin first presented his theory of evolution in 1858, he had no idea it would make the impact it has across so many different fields. His name has become synonymous with forward-thinking innovation: witness the 1991 Darwin asteroid, the Darwin 4078 video game, and the Unix base for Apple's Mac OS X operating system called “Darwin.” His influence is everywhere, and can even be seen in the field of electronic discovery, where individuals and businesses have needed to continually adapt to a rapidly changing environment in order to survive.

What started as simply coding data from hard copy correspondence into a database for attorneys to search by keywords or to sort by dates has widened to encompass areas like forensics, information governance, concept searching and analytics, content management and trial graphics. Indeed, e-discovery is a much more robust field than when it started, and that expansion can be seen in the growth in the number of different tools, ways they can be combined and options that can be used throughout each stage. It's a burgeoning field, but the pool of talent has not always kept up with expansion, and it remains a difficult industry to enter without experience.

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