Electronic documents such as E-mail are playing starring roles in legal investigations and lawsuits, but extracting relevant information from them can be time consuming and expensive. That's changing in some law offices, though, as more mature electronic-discovery technologies are providing attorneys with a faster, cheaper way to cull from electronic documents when building their lawsuits.

Vendors are working to make their electronic-discovery technologies more sophisticated in terms of what they can do, yet easier to use. For example, Fios Inc. earlier this month released an upgrade to its Web-based electronic discovery software called Prevail, which aggregates electronic data for viewing and categorizing by legal support teams. The upgrade, which includes instant messaging for team members and more options and filters for searching data, is based on Microsoft's .Net architecture and SQL Server 2000. It lets legal teams view documents through a Windowslike interface. Fios says legal teams can be trained on Prevail in as little as 30 minutes, while some older technologies require several days of training. Prices vary depending on the customer.

Electronic-discovery technologies will likely encourage attorneys to consider what they can get from electronic documents when building their lawsuits, predicts George Socha, a partner at Halleland Lewis Nilan Sipkins & Johnson. Many attorneys hand off electronic-discovery duties to their support teams or outside firms, but not Socha, a self-proclaimed computer hobbyist. He uses EnCase from Guidance Software Inc. when he researches cases.

"Electronic-discovery tools are just beginning to gain wider acceptance in the legal arena," Socha says. "People realize they have no other way to deal with the volume of material."

Socha says electronic discovery is requiring a different mind-set for an industry of largely nontechnical professionals, but at least the tools are getting more user-friendly. "I see a huge difference between what's available now and what was available five years ago," he says. "Back then, I wouldn't even consider gathering 200 people with no technical experience to use a tool to go through electronic files."

Michael Bawden, litigation support manager at Sidley Austin Brown & Wood, began using electronic-discovery tools and services after one case required printing out 20,000 pages of E-mail. "The challenge of document discovery is more complicated than it was in the past, but it's also getting easier, in a way, because we have more technology available," Bawden says. And he adds the technology does save money: With one case, the quote for searching and categorizing data electronically came in at $500,000, while the manual process, involving printing out the electronic documents, was projected to cost the firm $6 million.

Other vendors in this area include Computer Forensics, Electronic Evidence Discovery, Fast Track Litigation Support, New Technologies, and Kroll Ontrack. The key goal for electronic-discovery tools is speedier and easier access to information from sources that extend well beyond E-mail, including electronic ledger books, customer databases, disks of legacy data, and cell-phone records.