Fulbright & Jaworski's report says that on average, U.S. companies in the survey spent $16.8 million on legal beagles and related expenses. E-discovery is a key cost component. But many companies still aren't prepared to tackle e-discovery in-house, and many others don't even have corporate-wide policies governing data retention.

If your company gets involved in a lawsuit, you're likely to run into the term "litigation hold." While it might sound like an embrace from an attorney, it's not quite that warm and fuzzy. In very simple terms, it means you have preserved all of the documents and files the courts are likely to require, and you'd better be able to find them fast, too.

Of course, all of this leads back to storage and, more specifically, archiving. Although archivers are still relatively new products, they've been around for some time now and a fair number of companies have wasted little time implementing them. But according to our own Storage Purchasing Intentions Survey, approximately 40% of you haven't implemented any form of archiving yet. And the picture isn't likely to get any prettier next year: Fewer than 50% of our respondents noted any plans to buy archiving products by the end of the year.