Illuminating eDiscovery

Until fairly recently, “value” wasn’t really a stated goal of ediscovery. eDiscovery was just an unavoidable expense. Document production was unrelated to the larger goals or substantive work of the litigation. The idea was simply to meet obligations as cheaply as possible, usually by negotiating for the lowest rate for each line item.

A few weeks ago, along with my Lighthouse colleague Brandon Jessup, Executive Director of Technical Project Management, I spoke at the Washington Association of Corporate Counsel’s fifth annual Technology Summit. Together, we presented a session entitled Metrics that Matter – Understanding Benchmarks of Success and How to Measure Them. In the session, we discussed various measures of success in ediscovery. Since cost containment is always an important factor, we covered some practical tips below:

Pricing in the ediscovery industry has often been nuanced, opaque, inconsistent, and unpredictable, leading to confusion, frustration, and sometimes the feeling of being nickel and dimed. There has often been no clear way to compare and contrast vendors, third-party solutions, etc. But, why? There are several stages to ediscovery, as seen in the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), each of which involves separate tasks, and, too often, each task has its own cost component. There are numerous service add-ons, data volume premiums,...

The cloud. There’s no escaping its future as the king of data storage. But, what about lingering concerns over security, especially in the traditionally risk averse world of ediscovery?

Perhaps the most influential event in ediscovery and information governance is Legaltech (otherwise known as Legalweek). Invariably, the most anticipated topics of the year are highlighted, showcased, and analyzed here, with thought leaders and industry observers convening to explore and prepare for the year’s challenges. Again, this year, the prognosticators appear to have predicted the most impactful topics correctly, which was borne out by the in-depth and well attended seminars, keynotes, and discussions on offer.