The list of financial services companies that are being sued as a result of the problems in the US sub prime mortgage market and the following credit crisis is very long.
Famous names such as Merrill Lynch, Countrywide and Citigroup are facing lawsuits brought by investors. Individual shareholders and even cities are suing other companies in the fall out from past lending practices. According to the Economist the number of law suits doubled in 2007 compared to 2006.
The bulk of this litigation is taking place in the US and although there have been some high profile cases in Europe such as Barclays suing Bear Stearns and HSH Nordsbank suing UBS it seems unlikely that the same volume of lawsuits will occur in Europe.
These financial services companies will have to undertake extensive searches of all their paper and electronic records as part of the litigation process. For many years Xerox has been helping companies facing litigation to address the difficult, time consuming and expensive business of document discovery. As more law suits are filed in the coming months this is going to be a necessary evil at an increasing number of companies.
