There was a trade show a few weeks ago in New York -- LegalTech. There were 10,000 people there, mostly lawyers -- tech heads on the sides, lawyers in the isles. The big focus was e-discovery and accelerated electronic evidence production, which represents a small amount of "law" but a big amount of money. Now that the laws say "keep," the scramble is on to "find" and "use."

You can't find what you can't see. If you don't know what to look for or where it is, it's difficult to find. Most legal discovery requests are not completely satisfied. It's systemic in the way we do things. That has to change.

This is why the whole classification/categorization of data has become a hot area. We spent 40 years worrying about how to store stuff but didn't think about how to find things until three years ago. There are numerous approaches to the problem, but they seem to be lumped into these basic categories.

1. Let someone else deal with it. Iron Mountain has all the tapes anyhow, so they have been providing enormously profitable services to companies that need stuff by taking all the tapes and turning them back into "data" and giving the data back to the company, or more likely to another service provider who can sort through the data to find the relevant stuff. The Mountain has recently flexed some muscle by partnering with Stratify Inc. and OnSite3 to provide a total solution. Specialized companies are providing integrated services like Zantaz Inc., which does e-mail archiving and e-discovery/litigation support for those e-mails. Outsourcing this stuff is hugely expensive, but most companies don't have the ability to do it internally even if they wanted to.

2. Firms such as Mimosa Systems Inc., Symantec Corp. and Xiotech Corp. are trying to bring technologies inside, where the data is created, to categorize and classify things up front so that no matter where you put them, you can find them. Scentric wants to classify it at creation and apply policy to the data itself and enforce those policies, trying to keep you from causing yourself problems later on. (I'm not sure the lawyers like the idea of people become forward thinkers, though. They may try to legislate against such things.)