E-discoveryware ‘Following the Money’ in Financial Crisis

The free fall in the U.S. macroeconomy is going to greatly magnify the importance of the e-discovery software business. Now is a good time to be Kazeon, Autonomy, Clearwell Systems, Attenex, Symantec, Seagate Technology’s MetaLINCS, Iron Mountain’s Stratify, LexisNexis, Recommind or a host of other smaller companies.

As the government takes over commercial banks such as Washington Mutual (that’s bad, certainly, but at least the “Woo-Hoo” commercials are over) and investment banks such as Bear Stearns, you can bet plenty of digital research will be going on behind the scenes to find out who made what bad decision, why, who was cheating and who ended up with money they weren’t supposed to have.

“Follow the money.” Sound familiar?

So much e-mail. So many Word docs and spreadsheets. So much work ahead.

The prosecutions, the indictments, the lawsuits — wow, are the lawyers going to be busy for the next few years on these cases. And they’re all going to be searching for documents, e-mails, IM transcriptions, audio tape, videos and so on to find out the truth. After all, where did all the money go, anyway? We don’t believe it vanished into the air.

Keep an eye out here at eWEEK for more about this.