Had breakfast yesterday morning with a good friend that works for one of the major eDiscovery companies around.  I always enjoy catching up with him because we can talk through pretty much the entire lifecycle of a message from point of origination (send) to point of accountability (courtroom).  So over a great breakfast at Oriel Cafe in Kirkland (try the pancakes with the berry compote..mmmmm), we talked about the pain and problems of electronic discovery. 

There are obviously many types of electronic records reviewed during litigation so I was curious what percentage was made up by email from his perspective.  His answer was over 80% with the balance made up of MS Office type files from personal or shared folders – many of which are duplicated in the email corpus because that is how they are shared.  Of course there are some additional formats in any sample, but on the whole email is the 800lb gorilla in electronic discovery.