Ediscovery Trends

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!

Was just reading the Clearwell Ediscovery blog and have to agree that the most significant rule of the new ediscovery pilot plan is one that creates an ediscovery liaison.  This pilot program is only being tested in the Seventh Circuit Court, but is an important milestone for the progress of electronic discovery. Often in litigation, the scope of preservation and other requests are far too burdensome.  Document management software is a requirement for any business that is likely to be involved in litigation.

Of course a company like Clearwell provides software that makes it easy to quickly cull and preserve responsive documents.  Their software provides excellent document management during the course of litigation.  Their search technology allows document review costs to be reduced drastically, so document review software can be used more effectively.