The report, which took in responses from 5000 legal professionals in 10 EMEA countries, also notes that 51% of lawyers had been fined or sanctioned within the last three months.
In the UK, 78% of lawyers found that electronic stored information (ESI) has become critical to their daily work, whilst 54% admitted they had lost a case, seen a case delayed or been sanctioned by a court or regulator in the last three months owing to ESI problems.
Over half of UK lawyers also said they believed that the bigger challenge with ESI is the volume of data that has to be searched, whilst 55% of UK lawyers believe that improvements to search technology – used to identify, preserve and process ESI – would alleviate their current challenges
According to Symantec,sponsors of the research, whilst poor availability of 'digital evidence' can hinder the legal process, the power of technology to identify and collect relevant information among millions of electronic files has had a positive impact on many cases across the EMEA region.
Ninety-eight percent of the lawyers questioned said that ESI identified 'digital evidence' during e-discovery had been vital to the success of legal matters in which they had been involved in the past two years.
Commenting on the results, Jaap den Exter van den Brink, information manager with Symantec, said that they demonstrate the pivotal role ESI now plays in routine legal matters.
"91% of EMEA lawyers rate it as either critical or important to their day-to-day work", he said, adding that assembling a body of evidence strong enough to win a case was testing enough when it involved patiently picking through hundreds or thousands of physical documents.
Owing to the rise of electronic data today, he went on to say, investigators have to deal with files in the millions.
"Our survey results suggests that even though lawyers might feel prepared, the fact they have all lost cases or legal matters because of difficulties producing `digital evidence' shows more needs to be done for the good of the legal process", he said.
"The good news is that lawyers acknowledge how e-discovery technology can make locating `digital evidence' efficient, cost-effective and - above all - manageable", he added.