We’ve come a long way since the advent of eDiscovery. Many years ago, all the technologies and services that cater to it were the domain of highly technical companies and their products. For the most part, litigation support professionals relied heavily on the services of companies that either created eDiscovery technologies or sold the services around them. But over the last few years, the gap between expert and end-user is closing. Internal litigation support professionals and attorneys have increasingly become experts in this domain, enabling them to now perform eDiscovery workflows in-house.
Today when the time comes to send your data through the Discovery cycle, you have many options. The size of your project will help determine if you should outsource these services or perform them in-house.
If you aren’t currently doing some of your discovery in-house, it’d be beneficial to investigate your options. Particularly for smaller matters, there are now affordable, user-friendly tools designed to easily shepherd data through the eDiscovery process. Included are tools that ably perform early case assessment, process all common file formats, effectively cull data, and help your team review and produce it to the other side. With these advanced technologies, ‘do-it-yourself’ eDiscovery is quickly becoming a viable option.
By outsourcing, legal departments can leverage the depth, expertise, technical knowledge, and computer capacity of a team that does nothing but focus on eDiscovery project management. And on many matters, particularly large or complex ones, outsourcing is an extremely viable value proposition.
However, with the right insourcing tools, legal teams can process, cull, review and produce discovery data in a fraction of the time it takes to create a Request for Proposal (RFP) in order to even begin the outsourcing process. This approach also gives inside counsel the tools to complete their discovery objectives while saving valuable time and money.
For law firms, the right do-it-yourself technologies also help provide tremendous value to their clients. And furthermore, since corporations are usually the entity that has the most to gain or lose in litigation, inside counsel and executives also want to be involved in the process. In-house discovery technologies, if done correctly, allows this to happen. They have also proven to help corporations reduce overall discovery costs.
Many firms still see value in outsourcing this work to litigation support companies in order to leverage the infrastructure, expertise, project management and data analysts provided as part of that service. However, as collected data becomes more structured and better technologies are offered, more and more firms are finding insourcing a viable option.
Another advantage is that the ‘do-it-yourself’ eDiscovery route allows you to have complete control over your highly sensitive data – and gives peace of mind related to knowing how many people will be viewing the data and how many copies exist. The unfortunate reality is that upwards of 95% of collected data is not relevant or responsive, and corporations find themselves unnecessarily sharing sensitive information that should have never been removed from the enterprise. In addition, most vendor models charge to deal with that irrelevant data creating inflated costs associated with culling data to that which is most relevant.
By having the right technologies and resources in-house, both law firms and corporations can take collected data and immediately load it into their internal discovery processing, culling and review technologies. In short, ‘do-it-yourself’ eDiscovery can greatly streamline the eDiscovery process while saving time, money, and keep you in the driver’s seat the whole way through.
InterLegis’ in-house solution, Discovery360, provides the widest range of sophisticated eDiscovery technologies in one application. As an end-to-end discovery solution, it includes powerful analytic tools that provide a complete view of all collected data in order to intelligently cull it down to the smallest, most responsive set. It also allows legal teams to choose – on a case-by-case basis – which matters they outsource or process in-house. This means that legal teams can have a mix of cases hosted both internally and on InterLegis’ secure servers while accessing all within the same software. And with its attractive, all-inclusive pricing, Discovery360 can help legal teams dramatically reduce discovery costs by paying for only what they need.
Discovery360 Desktop is available immediately and free to install. To apply for a copy of the downloadable software, contact info@interlegis.com or visit www.InterLegis.com.
