eDiscovery Daily Blog

• December 13, 2019

No, that’s not Tom O’Connor, it just looks like him… ;o)

Hard to believe it’s the fifteenth edition, but here it is: Norton Rose Fulbright’s 2019 Litigation Trends Annual Survey.  We’ve covered it a few times over the years, but I don’t remember it ever being released this close to the holidays.  Nonetheless, the survey, as always, had some interesting findings.  Let’s take a look.

287 corporate counsel participated in the survey, all respondents were US-based or represent US-based organizations.  The breakdown was as follows: General Counsel 39 percent, Head of Litigation 19 percent, Associate/Deputy/Assistant GC 27 percent, Other 16 percent.

Some notable statistics include:

• $1.5 million spent on disputes per $1 billion of revenue (median average);
• 17 percent of respondents expect to increase their team sizes, with only 2 percent predicting a decrease;
• 66 percent of respondents are using Alternate Fee Agreements (AFAs), but generally for only a minority of spend;
• 62 percent of respondents now have to balance cross-border discovery with jurisdictional data protection regulations;
• Greater than 50 percent feel more exposed to cybersecurity and data protection issues, while 11 percent feel less exposed (the second number is the one that surprises me);
• 35 percent expect volume of disputes to rise moving forward, while only 9 percent expect the volume to decrease (a 26 percent net, which is a rise of 9 percent over 2018 and the third year in a row that the net went up);
• The most common types of litigation pending against respondent companies over the past 12 months were Labor/Employment 49 percent (up 7 percent from 2018), Contracts 42 percent (up 1 percent), Personal Injury 18 percent (down 1 percent) and IP/Patents 18 percent (up 3 percent);
• 44 percent of respondents identified Cybersecurity/data privacy as the most likely new source of dispute for their business on the horizon (more than four times the next likely sources: Regulatory and Climate/environment at 10 percent each).

That’s just a sampling of numbers, you can go to the Norton Rose Fulbright site here to download your own copy of the free report.

So, what do you think?  Do any of those numbers surprise you?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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