The eDJ Group recently released a report reviewing e-discovery in 2011 and forecasting what the major trends will be this year. Here are some of the key things they noticed in 2011:

• Corporations admitted the need to treat e-discovery as a business practice
• Despite a lot of hype, the language and atmosphere surrounding the idea of “information governance” is still vague. eDJ Group says the market is not yet mature.
• In light of Recommind’s attempt to patent the company’s form of predictive coding, eDJ Group took an informal poll on whether predictive coding is defensible. It did not yield clear results. Of those polled, 33.9 percent said yes, 27.9 percent said no, and 38.1 percent think it’s too soon to tell.
• Buzz around the cloud intensified in 2011. A survey revealed that 70 percent of respondents are leaning toward using the cloud. However, it would also appear that most companies aren’t prepared to conduct e-discovery on information stored in the cloud.

The eDJ Group believes that several of 2011’s prominent trends will continue to gain ground in the coming months. Here are a few things we can look forward to in the kingdom of e-discovery:

• The cloud will certainly continue to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue, but we can expect that legal, security, privacy and control issues may slow down the rate of growth
• Information management platforms will emerge to help companies deal with the challenge of slogging through “Big Data”
• Vendors will start hawking more and more solutions for the collection and preservation of information on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
• New case studies will help the legal community feel more at ease with predictive coding