Illuminating eDiscovery

The future of the legal field is managed services. According to Richard Susskind, author of Tomorrow’s Lawyers, “the future involves commoditization of legal services and legal process outsourcing, along with other advancements driven by technology and process development.” In a recent presentation, Susskind quoted Wayne Gretzky. The famous ice hockey player often counseled, “Skate where the puck’s going, not where it’s been.” When it comes to ediscovery services, the “puck” is headed with great speed towards managed services delivery...

Not surprisingly, almost on a daily basis, I receive questions about what constitutes a defensible collection within the United States. This question is usually specific to how a client can limit the amount of data being collected and processed, while still meeting discovery obligations. In addition, I will often receive questions on whether or not in-house resources can be leveraged to avoid the cost of engaging outside collection vendors. In this article, I’ll dive into both issues and their solutions.

Tell me if this sounds familiar. Litigation has been looming for months, and one day a subpoena drops on your plate. The deadlines are tight. Maybe it’s a second request and there are only six weeks to comply. Suddenly, everything has to happen at once. Outside counsel and vendors have to be engaged, teams have to be formed, processing and production specs have to be finalized, and data has to be collected. In the midst of this excitement, data collection resources are deployed to an on-site location to collect from multiple custodians and...

Recently, the ediscovery industry has started to see a new trend where there is a desire to take all or part of the ediscovery process in house in order to rein in costs, introduce stricter controls, or both. If you are currently considering taking this step, there are a few items below that you should be aware of that can make this evaluation meaningful and produce desirable results:

Software as a Service, referred to as SaaS, is one of many service models based on cloud computing that has become prevalent in the last decade. An often quoted definition of SaaS is, “a software distribution model in which a third-party provider hosts applications and makes them available to customers over the Internet.” (Definition: Software as a Service (SaaS), 2016) In many cases, the provider is not actually hosting anything but instead leveraging a third-party hosting (cloud) solution such as Amazon Web Service (AWS), Google Cloud...