The FRCP as a business engine

Today’s post started out as one of those cute-law-stats things we do so often when we can’t think of anything else, but it quickly morphed into something different. We thought it might be fun to see who was interested in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and which rule was most popular with the Teeming Millions. Surprise, surprise — it’s Rule 26. No doubt the rule regarding discovery was always popular, but new provisions concerning the discovery of electronic records have given it a real edge.

Since we started writing this post, fourteen new records-management businesses have sprung up (OK, that number we made up, but then again you have no idea how slowly we type). Every one of them uses a a sales pitch like this one. Law-driven FUD tactics are of course nothing new in the world of marketing (our favorite is the company that was selling US flags advertised as “Title 4, Section 1 compliant”) , but this is very big indeed: one company alone has more than 100,000 clients including a majority of the Fortune 500. Growth projections for this industry are hard to read — they tend to compare apples and oranges — but Gartner Group is predicting a 25% per year growth rate for the records-management business as a whole.