By John Bringardner

Way back in the 20th century, when Ford Motor Company was sued over a faulty ignition switch, its lawyers would gird for the discovery process: a labor-intensive ordeal that involved disgorging thousands of pages of company records. These days, the number of pages commonly involved in commercial litigation discovery has ballooned into the billions. Attorneys on the hunt for a smoking gun now want to see not just the final engineering plans but the emails, drafts, personal data files, and everything else ever produced in the lead-up to the finished product.

Welcome to e-discovery. Firms like Fios, Attenex, and hundreds of others now specialize in the scanning, indexing, and data-mining of discovery documents. (The industry got a boost in December 2006, when new federal rules went into effect requiring parties to produce discovery documents in electronic format.) E-discovery vendors pulled in $2 billion in 2006 — and that figure is expected to double by 2009.

So how has this evidentiary deluge changed the practice of law? Consider that five years ago, newly minted corporate litigators spent much of their time digging through warehouses full of paper documents. Today they're back at their desks, sorting through PDFs, emails, and memos on their double monitors — aided by semantic search technologies that scan for keywords and phrases. In another five years, don't be surprised to find juries chuckling over a plaintiff's incriminating IMs, voice messages, video conferences, and Twitters.