Ediscovery Trends

In the process of litigation, it is sometimes necessary to conduct a full-scale document review.  Your litigation support vendor probably has a few ideas on how to approach such a large project, but the sticker shock can be a bit overwhelming.  Let’s look at what you’re really getting into when you need to budget for a document review project.

The first thing to look at is how many total documents you have, and what your resources are expected to be.  If you have ten million responsive documents and an unlimited budget, then you can afford to pay attorneys to review them all by hand.  But if you only want the documents that are most relevant to your litigation, I’d recommend culling the data set through an advanced search platform.

While the upfront cost for some vendors like Clearwell or Kazeon may be high, the long-term savings are there, especially for large projects.  You don’t need to hire 20 attorneys to sit in a room for months reviewing documents – not only can you reduce the overall volume of responsive documents, but you can also classify them much more efficiently than was previously possible.

After your data set is culled down, you’ll want to look at a review tool that can handle what you want to do with these electronic documents.  If it is a small case, you may wish to review them locally, but if it’s a large case involving multiple law firms, you will need to make sure that the documents can be securely accessed online.

I’ll offer more tips on effective document review sometime next week.

The American Bar Association has created one of the ugliest charts I’ve seen that lists comparisons of document review software.  It’s difficult to compare the features of all these products, so this chart can be useful, but it could also do more harm than good.  Litigation support professionals know the value of the EDRM model, and this chart doesn’t really help you plan for litigation, but rather just react to it.  Nonetheless, it’s nice to have a side-by-side comparison of some of the various document review platforms.  The information in this chart appears to have been supplied by the lit support vendors, so take the info with a grain of salt.  There are a couple of review tools that I haven’t heard of before, so I’ll be looking into those a little more closely.

Incidentally, the ABA does have a nice little Legal Technology area that caters to experts and newcomers to the legal-tech community.

Can good Ediscovery Tools reduce legal costs?  Of course they can!  The strange thing is, you may not seem like you’re paying $18K per gig (the Gartner report’s estimated cost for document review), but you probably are.  This is why it makes sense to control litigation costs at every step of the process.

The first thing to know is that you want as few potentially responsive documents as possible loaded into your document review software (Concordance, Summation, or iConect for example).  Before you even use those ediscovery tools, consider culling with a search tool that was designed to do a more in-depth analysis, such as Clearwell, Attenex, or kCura.  This way you’re not wasting resources by keeping a small army of document coders, but instead you’re reducing litigation costs by limiting the documents your coders need to review.

Litigation support vendors have been using these kinds of software platforms for years.  Don’t be afraid to change your ediscovery strategy, it very well could save you money in the long term!