Experts have been nagging information and records managers for years that preparing for electronic discovery in the ordinary course of business is critical. The links between the two disciplines has been underlined with the announcement that Open Text has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Recommind, a leading provider of ediscovery, and information analytics.

The Canadian ECM giant is to absorb Recommind’s SaaS and managed services solutions which include, Axcelerate for eDiscovery review and analysis, Perceptiv for contract analytics and Decisiv for enterprise-wide information access.

OpenText also believes it can leverage Recommind’s analytics to solve concrete and expensive business problems.

The threat of litigation and subsequent electronic discovery (ediscovery) requests is pushing companies to better manage their data.

In the past, companies approached ediscovery by keeping everything, and reviewing all responsive content for an ediscovery request.  However, this naturally means that the most expensive step, Review, is being performed on masses of content that were unnecessarily retained.  

Studies show that an average of 80% of electronic content under storage shouldn’t be kept. 

 “The difference between e-discovery and information governance is the difference between reactive and proactive,” notes Bassam Zarkout, CTO of RSD, a provider of information governance solutions.

“The discovery and inventory of information assets is a necessary part of an overall information governance strategy.”