Mike Davis, an analyst at market research firm Ovum, believes that a familiar group of consulting giants will benefit from the e-discovery boom.

"The people who are going to make lots of money out of this are the Big Five," he says. "If you can't afford your own team, you are going to be services-led."

HP information management marketing director Erik Moller agrees that billable hours can mount up, especially when firms are new to e-discovery. "Typically, a SWAT team goes in, does a hit and legal teams make a lot of money," he says.

Moller says that many firms believe data has gone because they deleted it, without realising that messages and files can be easily recovered if they have not been destroyed. "The legacy information clean-up problem is the elephant in the room," he says. "It's purge, not delete."

Another problem, Moller notes, comes from the tension between IT departments seeking to keep storage volumes at a manageable level and the demands of regulators, but he believes that firms that build up experience in e-discovery can automate processes and cope with internal staff.

Autonomy's Eagan contends that the demands of e-discovery could lead to a new role where an IT expert partners with the legal counsel of the company.

Where next for e-discovery? Autonomy's roots in search are leading it to pursue more intelligent software where suggestive patterns can be automatically detected when parsing text. Image and audio searching are also likely to become more important as regulators demand more and more information.

Whether data resides in email, instant messaging system, phone call or video stream, companies are becoming liable to find information or suffer the consequences. Little wonder that e-discovery is becoming another critical piece of kit to serve the governance needs of organisations.