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Managing the Unpredictability of eDiscovery Costs

Client fees are the lifeblood of the legal industry which means unpredictability isn’t congruent to the financial stability of a successful law firm. This means your eDiscovery document review solution can be as much of a liability as it is an asset when striving to remain profitable.

As every case differs in the volume and type of data collected, processed, and reviewed, the costs associated with it can be unpredictable. Without a balanced and consistent cost structure, the result can lead to an undesirable profit loss.

When eDiscovery was first utilized in the late 1990s, it was only in special cases involving email correspondence. Today, the American Bar Association (ABA) estimates that eDiscovery accounts for more than 80% of costs.  That translates roughly to $42 billion a year, with 70% of costs directly associated with document review.

Today’s eDiscovery has evolved further to include device data derived from multiple sources which can quickly inflate expenses and severely impact your operating budget.

At CloudNine , we are dedicated to guiding you towards eDiscovery cost recovery through our streamlined and optimized data solutions; read on for more of our tips to getting to the truth and your revenue goals more efficiently.

Get to The Truth Faster: The Biggest Challenges to Profitable eDiscovery

Controlling eDiscovery costs and charging your clients appropriately comes with certain challenges.

eDiscovery Insourcing vs Outsourcing: The profitability between these two options isn’t always black and white. There are a variety of factors when considering if outsourcing eDiscovery is the right choice for you, including:

  • What pricing models do vendors offer?
  • Are there additional fees?
  • How do hosting costs change over time?
  • Does the vendor own their technology or do they lease it?
  • What’s the full extent of capabilities the vendor has to offer?

By understanding the hidden costs of outsourcing, you can determine if it will allow you to balance cost and functionality effectively.

Delays in Court Proceedings: According to an article in the Washington Post, district attorneys are facing some of the longest case backlogs in living memory due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These delays mean more costs for longer hosting and storage times for important eDiscovery data, especially when being billed by the gigabyte.

Unpredictable Timing: The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees a person accused of a crime the right to a speedy trial. That means by federal law, a criminal case must proceed to trial within 70 days of indictment. However, felony trials can sometimes linger for well over a year.  The unpredictability of time between indictment and trial means costs can run higher than expected.

Managing Multiple Vendors and/or Systems: With many vendors specializing in different features and functions, it’s difficult to find a one-stop shop for all your eDiscovery solution needs. To compensate, you’ll need to engage with different vendors resulting in more contracts, more fees, and more time wasted learning how to operate the different systems.

By using a single solution to collect and assemble multiple modern data types, you can better retain the relevant context and timeline to tell the whole story. Putting together all the pieces of the puzzle becomes simpler, faster, and more strategic.

Making eDiscovery Costs More Predictable: A consistent cost recovery model can help predict and recuperate many eDiscovery expenses, but you’ll want to evaluate the pros and cons to identify the model best suited for your firm.

Examples of common cost recovery models include:

Billable Hours: The majority of law firms traditionally charge clients the billable hours they spend performing processing and project management. This model results in the least amount of pushback from clients as they’re paying strictly for the attorneys’ time. However, this can become less profitable if your law firm is forced to host its eDiscovery data long-term due to delays in court proceedings.

Billable Hours + Hosting Fees: To compensate for increased expenses, your law firm can add hosting fees to billing statements in addition to billable hours. However, clients often push back as they may not view hosting fees as actual legal work. These fees, usually charged per gigabyte, can help you recoup eDiscovery costs, but only if the client is willing to pay.

Third-Party Vendor Style: Another option for cost recovery is to invoice your clients with line items similar to how a third-party eDiscovery vendor would operate. You can include billing for individual items such as:

  • The number of gigabytes processed
  • The volume of data hosted
  • Any analytics applied to the data
  • Any licensing fees for software used

While some clients may be familiar with this model based on their experience with eDiscovery vendors, others may balk at these types of expenses. Learn more about how to optimize your eDiscovery cost recovery by downloading our eBook: Optimize eDiscovery Cost Recovery: 6 Steps to Make Your Review Process More Profitable.

Streamline with CloudNine. Optimize eDiscovery in Minutes.

As a proven leader in eDiscovery, CloudNine has provided innovative data collection and review solutions for hundreds of law firms and legal service providers since 2002.

Regardless of the type of cost recovery model you choose, CloudNine’s eDiscovery platform delivers a complete and flexible suite of solutions at a predictable and affordable price. Some of the benefits include:

  • SaaS Hosting for All Data – CloudNine’s SaaS offering allows analysis and review of all modern data types to include email, text messages, corporate chat applications, and geolocation.
  • Data and Storage Control – Right-size your data by culling it upfront to reduce your storage needs and control your costs.
  • User-Friendly Solutions – Every CloudNine solution is easy to use and operates on a self-service basis including smartphone collection data.
  • Dedicated Support – Our services teams are always available if you need additional support.
  • Flexible Storage – Optimize your spending whether you choose our all-in storage option or choose to pay for storage as needed.
  • Low Overall Pricing – Get predictability and affordability without compromise and leverage the features you need without paying for the ones you don’t.

Improve and optimize your eDiscovery by simplifying and streamlining the process. You’ll make it easier on your clients and more profitable for your firm.  Reach out and book a demo to  learn how CloudNine can make your eDiscovery most cost-efficient.

Generate More Revenue For Your Law Firm with Modern eDiscovery

One of the biggest challenges for any business is discovering new revenue streams once your growth reaches its zenith. For most law firms, this creates a welcome opportunity to offer new and better solutions while bringing more revenue into the organization.

As technology evolves, so does the diversity of new data types.  By expanding your firm’s ability effectively and accurately collect and analyze emerging data types, you create new opportunities to meet the changing needs of your clients.

Hit the eDiscovery Bullseye: The Latest Trends in Data Types

Electronically stored information (ESI) evolves every time new software is created. Whether it’s an updated version of current data or an entirely new data type, ESI is constantly changing.

To operate successfully, your law firm needs the ability to effectively process these modern data types. Consider the following statistics from two popular messaging applications – Microsoft Teams and Slack:

  • Teams has 145 million daily active users
  • Teams is used by more than 500,000 organizations as their default messaging platform
  • Slack has 10 million daily active users
  • Slack is used by 43% of Fortune 100 businesses

The sheer volume of modern data users creates an unmatched treasure trove of data vital to your client’s litigation. Other popular communication platforms like Google Meet, Zoom, GoToMeeting, and WhatsApp also contribute to the unparalleled growth of modern data types.

However, only recently have legal professionals begun to see the benefits of reviewing these data types since their reliance on traditional data types was easy and typically, sufficient.

Everyone in the legal profession can benefit from the ability to collect and analyze messages and metadata from communication platforms.  However, law firms and forensics companies in particular now understand the true value of other modern data like computer activity, geolocation, and financial transactions because it’s critically important to the success of their investigations.

Read a case study to learn how CloudNine is helped reconstruct conversations across multiple file types.

Why Modern Data Doesn’t Work Well with Traditional eDiscovery Platforms

Traditional data is typically straightforward in the form of Word documents, spreadsheets, and emails converted into PDF. The biggest issue with collecting and analyzing modern metadata on a traditional eDiscovery platform is compatibility.

Modern data transmitted by web clients and web servers is usually found within JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) files. JSON files are the preferred format for almost every public web service available today, including Teams and Slack.

HTML is another popular file type used by websites and social media applications like Facebook and Twitter to create individual pages.

JSON and HTML cause problems with traditional eDiscovery because traditional platforms cannot extract the content and metadata and organize it into an easy-to-review format. The result is usually very difficult to read, let alone review for eDiscovery.

Another challenge is simply the cost. In Zubulake v USB Warburg, the courts found the defendants were required to provide all relevant data files related to the case at their own expense. If your client is a large corporation, this could mean a large volume of devices to be collected for eDiscovery, which will naturally raise costs.

Tip the Scales of Justice with a Modern eDiscovery Platform

As applications like Teams and Slack make modern data more common, it has become more acceptable to be used in litigation. In the past, attorneys would argue to have modern data dismissed, and more often than not, the judge would allow it. Today’s judges have a better understanding of the value of emerging data so they require it for eDiscovery.

Modern eDiscovery platforms can collect a variety of modern data and accurately prepare it for review. Data types under this umbrella include:

  • Communication from messaging applications
  • File sharing applications
  • Metadata from video conferences
  • Mobile messaging including text, SMS, and MMS
  • Computer activity including the movement and alteration of files
  • GeoLocation
  • Social media posts
  • Financial transactions

In addition, by leveraging a modern data review platform, you can collect communication across multiple applications and devices. Based on the metadata, you can create pristine communication threads that flow from one platform to another, giving you a more complete picture and the context to understand how people were behaving and why. That simply isn’t possible in a traditional eDiscovery platform.

Stay up to date on how CloudNine is revolutionizing eDiscovery by signing up for our regular eDiscovery updates and best practices.

How Law Firms Use Modern eDiscovery to Offer Better Solutions

When you have the ability to review modern data, you can manage your case more effectively and efficiently by consolidating the workflows of multiple processes using a single SaaS platform.

  • Early Case Assessment. With CloudNine’s people and platforms, you are enabled to collect, cull, process and organize large amounts of modern data, to provide the needed insight to your case investigations to predict costs more accurately.
  • Unified Review Workflows. A simplified and consolidated workflow allows you to process, sort, review, tag, and produce traditional and modern data quickly and accurately.
  • Higher Level of Data Organization. By leveraging the metadata and conversation content, you can analyze and review all data types easier and more efficiently. This “Data NOT Documents” approach allows you to quickly narrow in on key conversations faster than traditional document review.
  • Context to Understand the Whole Story. Following digital conversations across multiple platforms along with computer activity, geolocation, social media and financial transactions, you create a more complete narrative to add the context needed to understand the whole story.

With these benefits, you can now demonstrate maximum efficiency and offer unparalleled service to your clients.

Your clients are looking to you to provide the best legal advice and management of their data, regardless of data types, modern or traditional.

By offering a solution giving them equal access to both traditional and modern data types with CloudNine eDiscovery solutions. Request a free demo and let us show you how CloudNine can help you generate more revenue while better preparing your clients for litigation.

Emerge From Data Chaos With eDiscovery Built For Today’s Data

Did you know in 2020 alone, the average person created 1.7 MB of data every second? (source).  Now consider this in the context of your latest eDiscovery case:  from cell phone forensics to computer user activity, the amount of digital documents to review is massive.  For example, here’s a glimpse of the daily counts of electronically stored information (ESI) including traditional and modern data types:

  • 4 billion emails (source)
  • 7 billion text messages (source)
  • 100 billion WhatsApp messages (source)
  • 4 billion Snapchat photo messages (source)

And, this doesn’t even include other traditional data types like documents or spreadsheets. Nor does it count modern data types like computer user activity, geolocation tracking, corporate chat applications, financial transactions, or social media posts.  While eDiscovery review platforms are designed to process traditional data types, you need a better, more efficient way to analyze the sheer volume of digital discovery types.

To provide a comprehensive view of all data types, CloudNine has introduced a modern data review experience to enable the analysis of existing and emerging data types, from a single eDiscovery solution platform.

Synergize eDiscovery of Today’s Data with CloudNine

Current eDiscovery review platforms were developed to support traditional data types like emails, Word documents, spreadsheets, and PowerPoint as evidence in litigation. The problem is they rarely provide the context needed to tell the whole story because they miss potentially relevant data found on mobile devices and corporate chat applications like Microsoft Teams or Slack. 

Without this nuanced data, you don’t have the ability to show behaviors, actions, or communication across different platforms, making it more challenging to prove your case as it’s very difficult to show context if you’re working exclusively with traditional file types.

Using Cellebrite UFED, a digital tool for extracting data from mobile devices, we can quickly collect cell phone data and inject it directly into the document review platform.

In addition, CloudNine’s modern data review platform can create timelines to organize relevant data in a linear outline to tell a story from beginning to end. Combining this with the ability to track digital conversations across multiple platforms, you’ll have better insight into:

  • How subjects were behaving
  • What they were doing
  • Where they were going
  • Who and when they were communicating with

CloudNine’s modern data solution expands your ability to understand the whole story in ways your competition can’t. The ability to collect and review this type of data allows you to better understand the facts surrounding your litigation, applying context so you’re able to tell the whole story.

Our solution for today’s data is suitable for both large and small data sets. It’s robust enough to handle the largest cases with extremely large data sets while remaining nimble to give attorneys the ability to view data quickly and easily on much smaller cases.

Regardless of the case or file types your team is reviewing, your eDiscovery team can get to the truth much faster.

Take the Rediscovery Out of Your eDiscovery: CloudNine’s ESI Analyst is the Perfect Complement to Enhance CloudNine Review

While CloudNine Review brings a fast, secure and easy-to-use platform to load and export data quickly and efficiently, the addition of a modern data solution adds a new layer of context and complexity to your litigation.

Now, when you receive your data, you can upload all the data sources into our modern data platform, perform eDiscovery and then import your modern and traditional data directly to CloudNine Review for a simplified and streamlined review.

Most legal firms and LSPs are forced to shoehorn modern data into traditional legal document review platforms. This can lead to confusion about the importance of what role specific text messages play in the story.

However, by letting you review every type of data more accurately, you get a more efficient solution that addresses both traditional and modern data, providing more insight and clarity into the factors behind the litigation.

A perfect example of this is the ability to analyze financial data and computer user activity. While collecting and reviewing financial data means you can track transactions and payments easier, tracking computer activity through registry files or event logs lets you see actions taking place on a digital level.

For example, if an employee copies a confidential document onto a thumb drive and walks out the door with it, you’ll be able to see that action in the data records.

As an organization, we are committed to evolving in the same way eDiscovery evolves. Stay up-to-date on the latest CloudNine updates by signing up to receive our latest eDiscovery news delivered to your inbox.

Don’t Fall Prey To Ingestion Congestion: The Ease of Integration and Deployment with CloudNine

Simple Deployment:  While the technical aspects of integrating CloudNine’s modern eDiscovery review platform is incredibly easy, the important thing to know is how simple it is to deploy the solution for your staff. Training for your administrators to operate the platform can be completed in an hour while training your review team for a specific case takes as little as 15-30 minutes.

Searching and Batching: By creating a series of searches based on specific keywords or phrases, you can pull data batches to assign to your team so they can review and add custom tags for relevant data. This is a valuable tool for anyone using this modern data eDiscovery solution, whether you have the resources to employ a litigation-support team or if you’re a smaller office with only one or two attorneys.

Superior Support:  If there’s any questions or problems, support is just a phone call away. If you don’t know how to use a particular feature or tool, we can schedule a quick online training session and walk you through the process. Plus, there are over a hundred resource articles in our library to help you learn how to better use CloudNine’s solution.

By offering solutions that empower you to collect, review and analyze both traditional and modern data types, you can streamline your eDiscovery process and capture information that tells the whole story through different platforms.

To complement your existing eDiscovery solution and combine both traditional and modern data types into a more complete narrative, contact CloudNine to find out how we can seamlessly fold our self-service, SaaS application designed for all data types into your eDiscovery process.

Ready, Set, Recover: Attain eDiscovery Cost Recovery with CloudNine

There’s a simple truth to running any business, including legal service providers and law firms: Profitability means you need to make more money than you spend. While this seems like an easy concept to follow, there are hidden or unexpected costs which can jeopardize your ability and financial performance. 

One of the biggest culprits behind your firms’ rising operating costs is legal data collection and review. As data sizes and timelines become more unpredictable so does the price of eDiscovery services. 

eDiscovery costs are on the rise for three main reasons:

  1. Exponential growth in data: As our communications have become more sophisticated, so has eDiscovery. Previously, cases including paper files now include financial transactions, geolocation, slack messages and more. This has led to an ever-expanding amount of data associated with new cases.
  2. Complex technology: Many eDiscovery solutions operate more like IT systems, requiring servers, networks, desktops, applications, etc. This requires firms who insource their eDiscovery to maintain a team of IT professionals to manage any updates that may arrive. 
  3. Complex infrastructure:  The fear of missing critical deadlines has driven system architects to prepare for extreme one-off situations versus everyday matters resulting in overbuilt and overcomplicated review solutions. 

The Most Common Cost Recovery Models

Despite the unpredictable cost of eDiscovery, nearly 82% (1) of LSPs and law firms continue to pass these costs along to their clients even though they typically recover only 77% of the costs (2).

The most common cost recovery models are:

  1. Billable hours for time spent performing eDiscovery services:  This typically results in minimal pushback from the clients since they’re accustomed to paying by the hour. 
  2. Billable hours + hosting:  Usually charged per GB, hosting fees allow you to recoup more of your eDiscovery costs but are not always accepted by clients as actual legal work. 
  3. Third-party style:  Charging fees like a vendor allow you to recoup costs for specific line items like GBs processed and hosted, analytics, and licensing fees. 

Surprisingly, 13% of LSPs and firms simply absorb the cost of eDiscovery rather than bill their clients (3).   The most common reasons for this are:

  • They practice in an ultra-competitive market
  • They honor previous agreements
  • They take on non-billable projects

To recoup more of your eDiscovery investment, read on to learn the steps you can take to optimize your cost recovery efforts or download our eBook: Optimize eDiscovery Cost Recovery: 6 Steps to Make Your Review Process More Profitable for a more expansive look into cost recovery. 

1.  Quantify Your Current Cost Recovery Challenges

Identifying all the costs associated with your eDiscovery lets you know where, how, and when you’re losing money. A few of the factors you should assess include:

  • Total annual eDiscovery and document review costs
  • Total revenue from eDiscovery
  • Cost comparison of running eDiscovery document review solutions in-house versus outsourcing. 

2.  Re-examine the Cost of eDiscovery Insourcing versus the Benefits of Outsourcing

While larger law firms can afford complex eDiscovery technology, smaller LSPs and firms need to balance cost and functionality to optimize cost recovery. They need to consider things like:

  • What pricing model makes the most sense?
  • What technology is more economical to own versus lease?
  • What features and functionality do you need to provide your users?

3.  Right-Size Your eDiscovery Data

With data volumes increasing exponentially, you need to be smart about what data you’re hosting in the cloud. By culling your data on-premise, you can reduce your hosting costs before you move it to the cloud. 

4.  Be Strategic About Your Storage

Not every client needs a lot of data storage. Adopt a solution that allows you to adapt your storage strategy on a case-by-case basis so you’re not stuck offering a single standard storage model to clients that may need smaller options.

5.  Choose Self-Service, Easy-to-Use Tools

Your cost recovery is much easier when your internal staff can perform eDiscovery during billable hours. By adopting a solution that’s simple and easy to run, you reduce the need for additional external services.

6.  Standardize Through One Primary Vendor

The more eDiscovery vendors you engage with, the more complex things get – more contracts, more fees, more systems to learn. Look for a single self-model with lost costs, flexible storage plans, and easy-to-use tools to optimize your cost recovery.

Now that you have a better idea of what it takes to improve your eDiscovery cost recovery, it’s time to go a little deeper to understand the benefits of an eDiscovery solution that’s perfectly suited to help you earn more than you spend. Click here to request a demo of CloudNine Review and learn how to make your review process more profitable. 

 

Sources

(1), (2), (3):  2019 eDiscovery Billing Survey

What Happens When You Don’t Have a Modern Data Solution?

Why a Modern Data Review Platform is Critical to eDiscovery

When legal professionals first incorporated electronically stored information (ESI) into their eDiscovery document review process, it opened the door for a variety of digital data types to be used in investigation and litigation. 

It didn’t take long for eDiscovery to begin taking in ESI like emails, documents, spreadsheets, databases, CAD/CAM files, digital images, and websites. These have remained the primary sources of digital discovery data used by legal professionals. 

However, as technology continues to evolve, new modern data types are becoming increasingly vital in litigation. These new modern data types fall under five primary categories, in addition to traditional eDiscovery: 

  1. Communication
  2. Computer/User Activity 
  3. Geo-location tracking (location tracking software)
  4. Financial Transactions
  5. Social Media

These modern data types have their own unique uses and their associated metadata allows you to create a chronological list of events and user activities so you can gain context where it did not exist in traditional discovery. 

Here are just a few examples of how it works:

  • By gathering data on computer activity, you’re able to see when individuals upload documents to Google Drive or download them onto thumb drives. 
  • Geolocation lets you determine where a computer activity took place so you know if they were at home, in the office, or at another location.
  • By using the metadata associated with different communication applications, you can track and document relevant dialogue between two parties as they carry their conversation from one device or application to another. 

With these additional data types, you’re able to tell a complete story through your legal review when combining traditional and modern data, in one unified eDiscovery platform. 

As more modern data forensic artifacts emerge, CloudNine is doing our part to help your eDiscovery team gain the context and confidence you need to solve your cases. Sign up to receive updates on our offerings here.

Reconstructing Digital Conversations To Unveil The Full Picture

In a modern data eDiscovery solution, you can do things that simply aren’t possible or are too difficult or costly to do in a traditional document review-centric platform. 

In a traditional legal document review platform, communication between two individuals would be collected and stored as individual documents. This means the context of the whole conversation including text before and after the individual messages could lose context in the conversation, leaving a void in the interpretation.

A modern data review platform allows you to collect data from multiple devices and applications including traditional ESI and loose files. By using the metadata associated with the collected data, you can select two individuals and review all communication between them in a chronological timeline. Now you have the context to perform the smartphone forensics and short message discovery you need to follow a conversation that began in Slack but transitioned to text messaging before concluding in WhatsApp.

Cell Phone Discovery: Reviewing Text Messages In a Modern Data Review Platform

Traditional legal review platforms are often inefficient when reviewing text messages. In a traditional platform, text threads are converted to PDF requiring each thread to be reviewed, text-by-text. In this case, five individuals in a group text messaging thread, means you’ll see the same message collected five times. This results in a lot of time and money wasted redacting large parts of the text thread, irrelevant to the topic. 

Smartphone data discovery allows you to filter duplicate messages, and remove 20-30% of the collected data.  With a simple click of a button, modern eDiscovery review allows you to select the text messages you want to advance and remove the irrelevant text from long or group threads.

Another challenge for traditional review platforms is the inability to maintain native formats for data. By relying on screenshots or PDFs, organizations using older platforms can fall victim to doctored images that could affect the course of the litigation. 

For example, in Rossbach v. Montefiore Medical Center, a plaintiff used screenshots of a text message to attempt to prove that her former employer had sexually harassed, then fired her. The message was allegedly sent to her iPhone 5 which cannot run an operating system beyond iOS 10. A forensics investigator examined the screenshot and discovered an emoji present in the image was a version not available until iOS 13 was released.

Modern eDiscovery review platforms capture text message formats (MMS and SMS) in their native format so there’s no risk of fraudulent or altered data in the review.  A unified eDiscovery platform will combine both traditional and modern data without creating documents from modern data sources.

Learn more about how your legal team can hit the eDiscovery bullseye with every data type with CloudNine Review here.

Why Organizations Are Hesitant to Commit to a Modern Data Review Platform

Some organizations are hesitant to adopt a modern data review platform because of their apprehension to change standard operations. They’re unwilling to change their review mentality from document-based to metadata-based or a hybrid of both.  After all, if it’s working, why change it?  

Many organizations are also forced to break-out their review processes among multiple platforms – one for traditional data like emails and Word documents and one for modern data like geolocation, social media and computer activity. 

In addition, there are some objections to native file production:

  • Retrieval of native files after initial document collection would mean additional costs.
  • Redaction is difficult or even impossible with some native file types.
  • Image-based productions are often accepted in court. 
  • Static images are equally useful for analysis and review of native files.
  • Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 34 does not specifically require native formats.

However, as modern data types become more common and important, organizations are beginning to understand that using a traditional, legacy document solution to review modern data is becoming burdensome, expensive, and slow. 

How a Modern Data Review Platform Simplifies eDiscovery

Simply put, a modern data review platform like CloudNine’s ESI Analyst organizes your data more efficiently by using metadata to sort modern data types by recipients, senders, timestamps, locations, and computer activity. 

The data is then tagged under one of the following data types:

  1. Call logs and voice mails 
  2. Chat applications (WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, etc.)
  3. Email
  4. Corporate chat applications (Slack, MS Teams, etc.)
  5. Text Messages (SMS, MMS)
  6. Computer activity 
  7. Geolocation
  8.  Social media
  9.  Financial transactions 

In addition, with a built-in foreign language tool, you have access to more than 80 supported languages so nothing gets lost in translation.

While legacy document review solutions are limited to reviewing documents, they miss key data points like geolocation, financial transactions, and other pertinent data that does not fit in a document-centric workflow.  The CloudNine, integrated solution allows you to filter, search, tag, and review all data in one platform.  

Let CloudNine help you integrate a modern data review platform into your eDiscovery processes. We can train your case teams quickly so they’re up and running in 15-20 minutes. To learn more about how our modern data solution can make your eDiscovery processes more efficient, drop us a line. 

Remote eDiscovery: Uncovering eDiscovery Best Practices From Home

When businesses and governments began shutting down due to the COVID-19 virus, it fast-tracked the slow and cautious transition to remote work begun by legal service providers. 

LSPs had already begun finding success operating in remote environments, using the cloud for eDiscovery data storage, processing, review, and analytics. 

However, it wasn’t until companies were forced to send their employees home to work that traditional legal departments and law firms began adapting to remote work environments. This led to finally upgrading, optimizing, and strengthening their infrastructure to accommodate this new normal. 

While this transition was a nerve-wracking experience for some, statistics tell us that remote work environments are not only possible but preferred:

  • 71% of companies have a new, positive view of remote work environments. (IDG).
  • 59% of remote U.S. workers would prefer to continue working remotely. (Gallup).
  • 69% of remote U.S. workers reported their productivity levels are the same or higher when working from home. (Citrix).

With a more productive eDiscovery solution, your LSP is set up for success. Learn about four other ways your organization can build value and boost margins in our ebook here.

The Benefits of Remote eDiscovery Tools

As foreign a concept remote working seemed to be, the benefits were obvious from the very beginning. Roadblocks were quickly reconciled, increasing efficiencies and reducing costs associated with eDiscovery. 

This was expedited by the realization that while personnel were becoming increasingly more dispersed, the eDiscovery data they were working with was becoming more centralized due to the cloud. Secured cloud environments allowed for a more efficient and effective workflow to collect, process, host, review and produce critical data. 

Other benefits of remote eDiscovery tools include:

  1. Lower-touch processes so you have fewer discoverable copies and less movement and enhanced control of data
  2. No geographical workforce restrictions so you can bring in the best people no matter where they live
  3. Easy scalability for near-instant provisioning or decommissioning
  4. Cost-effectiveness that allows you to shift from CapEx to OpEx

How Secure is Remote eDiscovery?

For some traditionalists, as well as others that are simply more cautious by nature, there’s a question of data security that has them hesitant to embrace a remote eDiscovery solution. However, there’s nothing to fear with the right eDiscovery solution.

Simply put, eDiscovery cloud computing provides a secured digital environment that protects the integrity of your data. To ensure this, there are certain security protocols your LSP must follow to guarantee your data security. 

  • Personnel should only use company devices or assets when working remotely
  • Data encryption must be used in transit
  • Multi-factor authentication must be deployed
  • Secured connectivity must be ensured for all employees 

With these protocols in place, your data is secure from all but the most devious and skilled cybercriminals. The only thing you’re missing is the perfect partner to provide a solution that makes sense for you and your clients. 

The CloudNine Remote eDiscovery Solution

Offering speed, security, and simplicity, CloudNine Explore empowers LSPs with a remote eDiscovery solution that allows you to investigate issues, assess risks, confirm compliance and begin early case assessment quickly and easily. 

More importantly, with CloudNine Explore, you’ll maintain the highest quality of data processing by leveraging these benefits:

  • Process as many as 1 million records per hour
  • Deploy CloudNine anywhere through a single workstation deployment
  • Easily scale up or down across multiple secured devices with mobile access
  • Effectively manage remote teams with powerful administrative and user controls
  • Remove bottlenecks by reprioritizing projects and reviewers as needed
  • Use deduplicate, filter, and search functions to reduce your data and hosting fees

Discover what CloudNine Explore can do for your remote eDiscovery team here.

Finding Value in CloudNine Explore’s eDiscovery Tool

CloudNine Explore gives you early visibility into the size and scope of your eDiscovery data so you can determine costs upfront. By insourcing your eDiscovery solution, you can cull data before you send it out, resulting in a significant ROI by:

  • Reducing costs associated with data collection, processing, hosting, and review
  • Mitigating risks by identifying problems easier and quicker
  • Opting to deploy on-premise or in the cloud

While most eDiscovery solutions only work with traditional datalike documents, emails, and spreadsheets, CloudNine now has the ability to work with modern data like:

  • Communication (texts, MMS, etc.)
  • Computer Activity
  • Geolocation
  • Financial Transactions
  • Social Media

To learn more about our modern data solutions, read the announcement on our acquisition of ESI Analyst.

By providing you with the ability to work remotely, scale quickly to take on more clients, or pivot for new types of data, CloudNine Explore allows you the flexibility to explore your options as an LSP so you can decide best practices for your organization and your clients. 

To see firsthand how CloudNine Explore can improve your remote eDiscovery solutions, schedule a free demo today.

 

How to Maintain eDiscovery Data Integrity

Emails, text messages, legal documents, written letters, faxes, and more: your eDiscovery team sorts, reviews, and analyzes all of these documents and more during the span of a legal case. When handling these confidential documents, it is important to keep these documents safe and secure. 

As a vital part of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), any data collected is done so with the intent to capture it exactly as intended or as it was actively being used. This ensures the searchability and traceability of your data so it can be properly collected, indexed, and documented for use in litigation.

To simplify this for eDiscovery, data integrity means ensuring the legal data you collect is accurate and consistent throughout its lifecycle. Maintaining eDiscovery data integrity is not only vital for the privacy and protection of your clients, but also for the integrity of your legal investigation.

At CloudNine, we take data integrity very seriously. Read on to learn about our recommended best practices for maintaining data integrity during your eDiscovery process or learn how we put those best practices into play with CloudNine Explore here.

Protecting the Quality of Your eDiscovery Data

Data types are constantly evolving. By 2025, the number of IoT devices deployed globally will surpass 25 billion. 

The variety, velocity, and complexity of electronic evidence multiply with each new generation and innovation of data technology. While email, spreadsheets, and documents are still the primary form of data collected, social media, streaming data, and data products continue to rise in prevalence. 

This rise in data types means your vigilance must increase with the introduction of each new technology or update with the average U.S. civil case collecting 130 GBs of data the average U.S. civil case collecting 130 GBs of data. 

To protect your clients and your firm, know the factors which can affect your eDiscovery data integrity:

  1. Mistakes due to human error: Your eDiscovery data integrity can become jeopardized any time human involvement is required. Data can be input incorrectly, duplicated, or deleted. Protocols, methods, or procedures can be ignored or designed incorrectly.   
  2. Transfer errors: If your eDiscovery data isn’t transferred properly from one database to another or if one is damaged or compromised, your file could become fragmented or corrupted. 
  3. Viruses or malware: Any outside software that can infiltrate your network has the potential to alter, erase or steal critical data.
  4. Compromised hardware: Any time your network experiences a significant failure like a computer or server crash, your hardware can become compromised. This could cause your eDiscovery data to be corrupted or inaccessible.

To ensure the quality of your eDiscovery data, you need to adopt a proven data collection solution that can operate efficiently, securely, and in a forensically sound manner. This means there’s no question concerning the quality of your data or any copies made. It also needs to be able to:

  • Work with modern data types
  • Work with a variety of data types
  • Pull many different fields of data

When you are able to easily and securely perform eDiscovery data collection, your legal team will be able to take on more cases and increase margins for your LSP. Learn more about this in our eBook: 4 Ways Legal Service Providers Can Build Value and Boost Margins.

Best Practices for Ensuring eDiscovery Data Integrity

To ensure eDiscovery data integrity for your clients, implement the following best practices:

  1. Understand Your eDiscovery Solution: Knowing the capabilities and limitations of your data collection software allows you to use it in the most efficient manner possible.
  2. Validate the Data: Confirm the data you collect is correct before you upload it to your server. 
  3. Implement Access Controls: Only necessary personnel should have access to the data so there’s less chance of data being compromised or corrupted.
  4. Maintain an Audit Trail: Any change to the data can have an impact on your litigation, so you need to know who touched what files when they accessed them, and what they did to them. 
  5. Backup Your Data: Regularly scheduled and reliable data backups are essential in the event of data loss. 
  6. Deploy Cybersecurity Measures: From timely software patches to limiting physical access to computers and servers, all known security vulnerabilities should be monitored and secured to prevent outside interference.
  7. Workforce Training: Every member of your team that has access to the data should be trained to follow data integrity guidelines to ensure the reliability of the data.

How CloudNine Explore Helps You Ensure eDiscovery Data Integrity

Data integrity is the foundational element to your eDiscovery process. With CloudNine Explore, you can ensure you get it right through our innovative approach to eDiscovery data collection:

  • Navigate through data to determine risk, scope, and cost up-front
  • Review new data with automated and in-person processes
  • Securely upload, process, and preserve data critical to your investigation or litigation
  • Step-by-step and advanced user workflows
  • Data, domain, file type, and additional filtering
  • Search term testing and reporting
  • File copies are created when exported
  • Provide information as required for legal production or continued investigation

Make your cases defensible and your firm profitable with eDiscovery solutions from CloudNine. With easy-to-deploy solutions that protect your eDiscovery data integrity, CloudNine is flexible and adaptable to meet any eDiscovery needs you have. Schedule a free demo today. 

How Automation Complements the Human Side of eDiscovery Review

If there’s one constant throughout human history, it’s that change is inevitable. In the legal world, some law firms and legal service providers often keep the status quo hoping they won’t be affected by the changes around them. For the rest, they adapt and integrate new eDiscovery technologies to include features like automation to find successful ways to overcome these changes. 

Adopting new technology is never an easy transition and it does come with concerns. But, we’re still not at a place where the software can litigate your case and accurately assign classifications for each document without human input. The need for human reviewers will always have incredible value to your firm but, automating the common challenges of eDiscovery document review will help your team work faster and more effectively. 

Learn how automation and eDiscovery come together to accelerate your legal document review process here.

Differences in Opinions: eDiscovery Solutions

Legal document reviewers are usually specially trained associates who need to analyze complex information quickly and make decisions based on:

  • Relevance
  • Privilege
  • Responsiveness
  • Confidentiality

Unfortunately, there’s often a difference of opinion within these teams which can lead to inaccuracy and inconsistencies in the classification of documents. In fact, in a study released by Autonomy, Inc., experts from seven professional review teams were asked to review a selected set of 28,000 documents. In the end, the experts unanimously agreed on the classification of only 43% of the documents. 

This means more than half of your documents could potentially be misclassified making your eDiscovery more challenging. 

Removing the Guesswork in Legal Document Review

Legal document reviewers are often presented with a broad overview of the matter along with a binder of protocols and example documents. This training includes little eDiscovery data and a lot of guesswork as to what is being sought after in the documents.

A few days – or sometimes weeks – after the eDiscovery review has begun, a quality control team reviews the progress to identify discrepancies in classification and specific reviewers with low accuracy.  At this point, the reviewing team is retrained with more specific protocols based on the errors uncovered. 

Having more accurate protocols from the onset of your legal document review supports productivity and avoids wasted time and effort.  

With improved efficiency, your legal team is one step closer to optimizing your eDiscovery review process. Learn how to accelerate your eDiscovery even more in our eBook: Optimize eDiscovery Cost Recovery .

Flawed Legal Document Review Protocols

When legal review protocols are established, they’re usually created by subject matter experts, well-versed in the matter. Despite their credentials, the initial review protocols can suffer from two primary flaws:

Flaw 1: Lack of Knowledge: When the expert creates the review protocols, they usually do so before they’ve had a chance to review the documents in context to better account for variations in the review set.

Flaw 2: Lack of Understanding: Once the protocols are written, the reviewers have to fully understand them or efforts to accurately classify documents becomes much more difficult and error-prone. 

Improving eDiscovery Review with Better Protocols and More Accurate Classifications

Errors and inefficiency in document review is often linked to insufficient training.  Review teams will struggle to understand exactly what they’re looking for if protocols are too vague and don’t account for unforeseen variations.  This results in too many discrepancies in your document classification. 

The solution lies in leveraging automation to support human expertise and equip them with sound training of the review protocols and classifications.

Establishing Stronger Protocols for Legal Document Review 

First, select a diverse collection of documents through early sampling so your expert can review an ample variety of documents, concepts and classifications.  As you create the review protocols, allow your review team to interact with these documents for more hands-on experience with the document set. 

Next, ask each reviewer to classify the same small batch of documents so you can provide immediate feedback on their classifications. If they classified a document incorrectly, you now have an opportunity to question their decision-making to determine why they did it and if the protocols were unclear or misleading.

Get More Accurate eDiscovery Classifications

Once training is complete, you can review the results to check the accuracy of each reviewer. This helps you identify individuals on your review team who need additional training. In addition, you can create a threshold accuracy score each reviewer is required to meet before they’re allowed to begin reviewing actual documents from the data set. 

This level of review evaluation helps:

  • Identify poorly performing reviewers
  • Informs your decision-making on review assignments
  • Improves the overall quality of the early stages of the review

All of these lead to more accurate and cost-effective reviews.

Using CloudNine Review Automation to Improve eDiscovery Review

CloudNine Review offers an automated eDiscovery solution that’s fast, affordable, and easy to use. By utilizing the automation in our solution, you’ll be able to improve your training based on your reviewers’ accuracy and speed. This allows you to:

  • Create immediate feedback and critique for your reviewers.
  • Establish a more thorough understanding of classification protocols.
  • Improve review efficiency making it faster and more accurate.

Plus, you’ll be able to improve your initial review protocols by tracking which were misunderstood by your reviewers so you can determine why they were misunderstood and what you can do to make them more understandable. 

It’s time for you to check out CloudNine and see what it can do to improve your document review. Request a free demo and let us show you how CloudNine Review uses automation to improve the human element of your eDiscovery review.

eDiscovery in a Pandemic: How to Adapt to Turbulent Times

There’s no question COVID-19 continues to have a huge impact on the way we live and work. With the new Delta variant surging among the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike, the number of infections is rising once again. Unprecedented challenges are impacting law firms and legal document reviewers as well. 

From March 2020 to January 2021, New York City held only nine criminal jury trials.

For the first time in history, court trials dropped 99%  from the previous year in the country’s largest criminal jurisdictions. This is not an isolated occurrence as courts closed or severely reduced their caseloads to help stop the spread of the virus. This meant cases that should have closed were left open indefinitely, forcing law firms to keep their eDiscovery accounts open for longer than expected. 

Making matters worse, law firm clients found themselves unable to pay their invoices as the unemployment rate topped 14.8% in April 2020. While the economy has begun to recover, the unemployment rate still remained high at 5.8% in May 2021. This loss in client income had a predictable downstream effect on legal cases. 

Another consequence brought about by the lockdowns was the disruption of electronic discovery data collection. Law firms and their clients began shipping hard drives all over the country. New strategies had to be developed around data collection as document review service providers had to order hard drives, copy relevant ESI onto the hard drives, and then deliver them to the client. 

All of these challenges had a direct impact on revenue and forced expense cuts by collections, attending conferences, and certainly inviting clients to onsite meetings.

Ultimately, law firms will have to adopt new solutions or rethink old ones in order to thrive in this new, post-COVID world. The best way to do this? Adopt an agile, remote review process as part of your eDiscovery solution; learn how CloudNine Explore can help you adapt to the everchanging times here.

Be Prepared to Move Your eDiscovery Operations Remote 

When federal, state, and local governments began shutting down courthouses, law firms followed suit and sent their people home to work remotely. While every firm was different, size played a big part in how easy or difficult the transition was. 

For smaller firms, it didn’t take much – just a few tweaks to their infrastructure to allow remote access. Larger firms faced a bigger challenge as they had a lot more pieces to move to give everyone remote access to the shared drives and files they needed to do their jobs. 

In order to prepare for another shutdown or even a natural disaster preventing you from opening your office, CloudNine can help you convert from your standard in-office eDiscovery environment to a remote eDiscovery environment working easily and quickly. 

For firms already accustomed to interacting with the on-prem eDiscovery environment, they’ll automatically have full remote access to CloudNine Explore. They just need to have their network turned on and accessible. 

Some legal teams may not have the on-prem infrastructure in place to support that many users in one project at once, especially those teams that are large and spread. 

For these situations, we offer CloudNine Explore via our cloud so you can allow more users to access your data using our infrastructure at no additional infrastructure cost to them. With internet connectivity, you can access your CloudNine projects from any device, anywhere in the world. 

Add More Value to Your eDiscovery Retainer

Retainers are a good way to ensure clients are capable of meeting their financial obligations to your law firm. While most retainers are based on a specific dollar amount, some are established to run month-to-month or even year-to-year. These multi-year agreements help you establish a consistent revenue stream. To capture the best retainers, you need to have a reputation for being hard-working, committed, fair, and, most important, effective. 

Effective eDiscovery solutions bring value to your services beyond what other law firms have to offer. Highly efficient and secure, CloudNine Explore can eliminate duplicate or irrelevant files so you can focus on the documents that matter. With filtering tools that allow you to reduce the cost of processing by reducing the file size, you offer better value by providing more services for the price of your client’s retainer.

Improve Your ROI Through Your eDiscovery Solution

To help improve your services and increase value to your clients, you’ll want to understand how to maximize efficiency in your eDiscovery. CloudNine models out the cost of the solution versus the return you’ll get on your investment in the form of:

  • Data security
  • Cost reductions
  • Control over your data
  • Processing speed 

Plus, CloudNine partners with you to better understand your goals in order to offer a realistic solution so you know if you commit to X, Y, and Z today, you’re more likely to experience a higher return on your investment tomorrow. 

CloudNine also helps you level the playing field between larger law firms with astronomical budgets and smaller, more cost-conscience firms. By leveraging the solutions offered, you can access the same level of technology and services as larger law firms without investing in the infrastructure to host it. 

Learn how CloudNine Explore can help your firm be prepared for turbulent times, giving you added value to offer your clients, the ability to work remotely more effectively, and the confidence you need to invest in new solutions to get better ROI. Schedule a free demo with CloudNine today.

The Hybrid eDiscovery Solution: The Best Of Both Worlds

When deciding on the most efficient processes to run eDiscovery in your organization, the options are nearly limitless with hundreds of products and service providers vying for your attention.

Not all document review solutions are the same. Before you commit to your eDiscovery solution, you need to determine whether you would like to perform eDiscovery in-house, outsource it or do a bit of both.

Regardless of which path you take, CloudNine can provide you with a solution that is perfectly right-sized for you, learn more about CloudNine’s review solutions here.

What is eDiscovery Insourcing?

Insourcing is the delegation of a task or operation to a specialized unit within your organization rather than a third party. For legal service providers and large law firms, this includes both the technology used to perform legal data collection and people assigned to collect and review electronic discovery documents.

Insourcing is the traditional method for eDiscovery. Ten years ago, cloud solutions weren’t widely used for eDiscovery due to cost and the fact that most professionals were not aware or comfortable with it yet. Larger law firms invested heavily in developing an in-house infrastructure and software to process and review electronic documents.

Today, the organizations with the infrastructure already in place continue to insource their eDiscovery because it allows them to control both the cost and the data. Typically, these organizations are large law firms.

Benefits of insourcing your eDiscovery:

  • No data hosting or processing fees
  • Complete control over data collection
  • Protection from cybersecurity attacks on external parties

100% control means 100% responsibility. With this responsibility comes the cost of maintaining your eDiscovery environment which includes hiring IT professionals and updating the infrastructure regularly.

If your organization chooses to insource your eDiscovery process, you will need to hire a software company to develop your new software or hosting platform. Of course, you can avoid this if you already have a software engineer on the payroll.

In addition, your new eDiscovery software will need a robust infrastructure to support it. This requires a large investment of capital. If you already have the infrastructure in place, you may have to expand it before you are ready if your organization scales quicker than you’re prepared for.

Lastly, an insourced eDiscovery solution requires trained professionals to make it operational. Not only will you need a team of dedicated attorneys to review the documents, but you’ll need IT staff to maintain the network, software, and hosting platform.

Interested in learning more about the pros and cons of corporate legal insourcing? Check out our blog, Insourcing vs. Outsourcing Your eDiscovery Review Process.

What is eDiscovery Outsourcing?

Outsourcing is the transfer of day-to-day operations of a business function or task to an external service provider. For eDiscovery, this means an outside organization is responsible for providing the technology and personnel to collect and review electronic discovery documents.

Because of the high expense associated with maintaining an in-house infrastructure, many legal organizations contract legal service providers or legal technology companies to host and process their eDiscovery documents.

This also means you do not need to keep IT staff or review attorneys on payroll full-time. Instead, your expenses are tied to a few laptops and a reliable connection to the internet.

With less investment in infrastructure, accounting becomes much easier because you’re not looking to make money back on an expensive investment. Your books and budget are simplified, only paying predictable monthly hosting and processing fees.

Other benefits to outsourcing include:

  • Up-to-date software patches to protect you from cybersecurity threats
  • Hosting and processing fees are based strictly on volume
  • Data can be culled to reduce the number of documents processed

Outsourcing means you have to frequently communicate with your legal service provider. The more you outsource, the more management you need to ensure communication is being relayed correctly and different pathways mean the odds of miscommunication increases.

Data transfer time could pose a problem if one party is suffering from a connection issue or if a hard drive has to be physically shipped to the service provider for processing.

Also, you’re dependent on the service provider’s availability. If they have a system outage or are the victim of a natural disaster, you’ll potentially lose access to your data.

A Hybrid eDiscovery Solution

For some organizations, one solution- insourcing or outsourcing- may not be suitable. Different challenges require different solutions and those that find themselves in this position can always consider adopting a hybrid eDiscovery solution.

A hybrid eDiscovery solution finds the best balance between your internal and external resources to perform specific business functions or tasks like eDiscovery collection, processing, and review.

For example, you could use insourcing to cull the data before advancing it to your outsourced processing. Or you could reserve your insourced platform to handle smaller data collections while sending larger data loads to your external service provider.

Tasks to consider for your hybrid approach include:

To determine which solution is best suited to perform each task, you need to consider these challenges for each:

  • ROI – How much will the solution cost and is it cost-effective?
  • Time – How quickly will the solution allow you to perform your eDiscovery tasks?
  • Complexity – How complex is your eDiscovery process and what risks are involved with the solution?

By recognizing your specific needs and comparing them to the benefits and drawbacks of each solution, you can determine which solution – insource, outsource, hybrid – works best for your organization.

Regardless of your decision, CloudNine can help guide you to discovering the right eDiscovery solution for you. We offer an all-in-one processing and hosting solution that you can use on-prem or through our cloud-based eDiscovery platform, giving you the option for insourcing, outsource, or hybrid.

To learn more, request a free demo and see how CloudNine can make your eDiscovery solutions more efficient and affordable.

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