Government / Public Sector agencies face a multitude of additional challenges to the eDiscovery process when compared with privately-owned organisations, challenges that can make procuring reliable and robust end-to-end services that much more difficult.
Common challenges presented in government eDiscovery are as follows:
According to Deloitte's 2019 Benchmarking Study of eDisocvery Practices for Government Agencies, 22% of respondents listed "volume of data" as one of the top three challenges they face when identifying, collecting and processing data for eDiscovery or freedom of information cases. In terms of the amount of data per case, 36% of respondents stated that had handled cases with more than a terabyte of data in a single case, and this was pre-pandemic. Post-Covid19 we have seen a massive influx of new data types stored in more varied locations than ever before, and this is especially the case for government bodies.
Of course, this survey was completed by government bodies in America, so we could expect there to be some disparity between these results and what we might have found had this survey been taken in the UK or even Europe. In general, however, it is fair to say that the overarching challenges facing government eDiscovery remain ultimately the same, only changing in the degree of priority or severity depending on location.