With critical responsibilities like mitigating company risk, forecasting, reducing spend, and protecting the company from data breaches, legal operations teams often overlook ediscovery as a priority. Yet 50% of litigation costs are attributed to ediscovery, which makes it a focus area that can result in a large win for legal ops.
Instead of allowing outside counsel to use a combination of service providers and technologies for ediscovery, the time is right for legal ops to embrace state-of-the-art ediscovery solutions instead of sticking with legacy technologies.
And great news — with the right technology, improving ediscovery processes is easier than you’d think.
The problem with relying solely on outside counsel
Ediscovery is time-consuming and rarely anyone’s favorite part of the legal process, so it makes logical sense that most legal departments offload it to outside counsel — I’m not arguing that point. However, making a small change at the beginning of the process will result in significant cost savings, and even potentially better outcomes for the matter.
It’s no secret outside counsel tend to over-review documents just to be safe, but that means you’re paying for them to review whole swaths of documents you could tell aren’t relevant with a single glance.
The solution here is to make use of robust search visualizations and early case assessment (ECA) functionality. By doing this, you can eliminate custodians, keywords, or time periods that won’t be relevant — and significantly whittle down the document population before the handoff to outside counsel.
DISCO Ediscovery allows unlimited user licenses, which makes for smooth, seamless collaboration with outside counsel to review the reduced document population on the platform. You can easily monitor review progress and securely communicate as questions arise.
The market is no longer a sea of same
In the past, legal operations teams may have been promised the world by an ediscovery provider, and gone through the effort to make a change only to get feedback from in-house counsel that the promised technology is difficult to use, costs extra, or that you are simply paying for a white-labeled instance of the exact same platform offered by a different vendor.
However, those technological benefits you may have been promised years ago are reality now — and this can have huge benefits for your team.
Take for example, AI. You may have been promised faster review only to find that the technology — which cost extra — required so much training that the review was done before your team could take advantage of it. With DISCO Ediscovery, you can turn on AI with a single click, immediately start training tag predictions that are refined automatically as you advance through your review, and have meaningful AI signals in a very short time. This helps bubble up the most likely relevant documents during the review, so you can evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your case, develop strong settlement negotiation positions, or reduce the time and cost to complete document discovery.
Along with other major benefits of modern technology — like cloud-native architecture that scales with your needs for searches and document loading that are just plain faster — one DISCO client has seen that every $1 spent on technology and review services now saves $6.15 in review costs. How’s that for cost savings?
Risk from data sprawl? Legal tech helps that too.
When you outsource your ediscovery to outside counsel, you’re not just sharing data with them — you’re also sending data to their multiple service providers and the multiple types of software each of them use, and then suddenly your data has been copied to and stored in 20 different locations. That means 20 more opportunities for your data to be exposed.
By using a single end-to-end solution, like DISCO Ediscovery, you’ll be able to reduce the risk of data breach through minimizing data sprawl. You will also get a birds eye view of your data and the opportunity to delete obsolete or redundant data on command.
It’s time to take back control of your ediscovery
The right legal technology has the potential to make a huge difference in the overall business objectives of legal operations. You may not feel like the expert in the room when it comes specifically to ediscovery, but given the impact it has on costs and security, it’s absolutely worth asking if there’s a better way.
If you’d like to talk further with a member of our in-house team, get in touch.