So here’s the list, via MarketWatch. Enjoy:

1. Government Investigations Increase: the economic tensions and increase in high-profile scandals will lead to a natural rise in government investigations, compliance audits and data requests.

2. Corporations Take More Control Over e-Discovery: e-discovery processes go “in-house” for having more control and reducing costs. Organizations will then see that a proper proactive approach will bring cost-reduction opportunities for organizations when an e-discovery process takes place.

3. Industry Push For Collaboration: improving collaboration efforts will reduce costs and conflicts.

4. Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) 502 Helps Automated Reviews: the use of automated analytical tools will be on the rise, reducing costs and lowering the time and money associated with inadvertent disclosure of privileged information.

5. “Showing Your Work” Becomes Mandatory: technology must be transparent and auditable, with organizations in the need of not only showing but also proving transparency and good practice.

6. Solving Colloquial E-Discovery Is Top of Mind: new technologies such as voicemail, instant messaging, web 2.0 and others must be included in the e-discovery process. Trustworthy auditing becomes the key aspect here.

7. Global Economic Downturn Drives Global E-Discovery: e-discovery will go international and therefore more complex. E-discovery technologies will be in the need to address privacy and data protection issues, in line with international compliance requirements.

8. Information Stores Will be Mapped: in line with prediction #1, there will be an increasing need for organizations to clearly map their electronically stored information. This means the capacity of retaining, archiving, searching and producing whatever information is required.

9. Integration Happens Across the EDRM Framework: integration will be the key for e-discovery technologies this year.

10. Information Management Shows Positive ROI: proper information management is no longer related solely to good practices, but will also have a clear cost-saving effect. Being unprepared and having unmanaged data stores will bring enormous costs if an e-discovery process comes into play. The key here is having a proper forensic readiness approach.

Leaving any sight of sarcasm behind, this puts into focus a simple -and enormous- truth: the high costs of any e-discovery process, specifically when organizations are requested to search among their data to produce evidence. If Google claims the process is difficult and too costly, any other company should really stop for a second and think on how to tackle this issue.

The first solution that may come to mind would be to improve searching capabilities for finding exactly what is needed. This solution, though, may produce what is called  a  “false negative” if a relevant file is not found, or  a “false positive” if something that is not relevant for the case is found  – recent findings suggest that 70% of the total documents revised in an e-discovery process are false positive findings. This proves that the correct approach should be not just having a good searching tool, but -as the columnist mentions- also that  organizations should “take available technological measures to preserve documentation for legal proceedings”. Having “the ability to preserve new documents as they are created” is key to this.

This brings me to what we do at Kinamik… which is exactly that! We build a centralized, independent and Secure Audit Vault that serves as a safe for all the sensitive data -such as audit trails-, making  them tamper-proof in the process for a future proof preservation. And of course, search capabilities are also available in that audit vault. Well … maybe I should give Google a ring?