Implementing an In-House eDiscovery Solution
eDiscovery can be an expensive process and its costs will continue to rise due to the inevitable rise in electronically stored information. Traditionally, eDiscovery was considered to be a time consuming task as it involved identifying, collecting, processing, reviewing, analyzing and producing any information or data relevant to a particular case.
Companies who hire consulting firms for their eDiscovery needs pay hundreds of dollars per hour for the service. The risk associated with this is that if the data collected and collated is incorrect, companies can be fined heavily. Another risk is that opposing counsel can get access to all of your information. Organizations need to take a proactive approach and implement an in-house solution that meets the needs of the eDiscovery life cycle and at the same time reduces cost and risk. This will help significantly hasten the processing, analysis, review and production of data, including a streamlined e–discovery workflow and strategic early case assessment.
According to the Gartner Group, enterprises and law firms spending on electronic discovery software and services will grow between 25 and 35 percent annually through 2012. With increasing litigations, organizations need to focus on finding ways to curtail IT and legal costs and improve legal eDiscovery readiness at the same time.
Requirements of an Effective In-House eDiscovery Solution
With an in-house end-to-end eDiscovery solution you can create a defensible and accurate eDiscovery process that reduces cost and minimizes risk. This level of dramatic savings requires an eDiscovery platform that contains five critical factors:
1. Integration of eDiscovery into Your Existing Platform –
It is particularly important to use an integrated solution for the most costly stages of eDiscovery workflow – processing, analysis, review and production. When integration takes place between in-house solutions and the existing structure, it aids in authenticating users and is capable of searching for and collecting unstructured, structured and encrypted data. When the initial stages of eDiscovery workflow are taken care of, enterprises leverage an advantage by keeping time consuming data to a minimum.
2. Comprehensive Automated Processing
An automated in-house solution reduces duplication and human error and aids compliance with security and FRCP procedures. Processing cuts down the initial data collection to create a single, searchable set of documents for analysis and review. Automation should also support and perform regular collection where it let off, wherein any changes in data, emails or files are updated automatically.
3. Efficient Review and Reporting
Review should be one of the strong points of the in-house eDiscovery solution as it is the single most time-intensive and costly stage of the entire eDiscovery process. Document search and analysis as well as the review product itself can dramatically affect the cost and efficiency of this demanding stage. The solution should also provide for extensive reporting that can provide insights into the whole process.
4. Flexible Production
Because of the huge repository of data and thousands of pages per case that need to be assessed, flexible and powerful production is needed. It enables organizations to considerably reduce production based time and risk. The production requirements are:
- TIFF or image based production
- Bates Stamping
- Rolling production
5. Easy to use and Flexible
An in-house eDiscovery solution should be able to guide you through the steps and procedures, be easy to use, require minimum training and be used by anybody in the organization – whether it be IT personal, inside counsel or outside counsel. In addition, Web interfacing can make it easy to access information from anywhere.
Conclusion
An effective and defensible in-house e-discovery solution can be built through careful planning and with a thorough understanding of the organization’s needs. Organizations must carefully evaluate what the product has to offer. The product they finally select should ideally offer sophisticated and integrated preprocessing, review and production, be easy to use for a wide variety of users with varying skill sets and should be rapidly deployable.
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