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Cost Recovery

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.

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

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.

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.

eDiscovery Cost Recovery: A Case-By-Case Assessment

Cost recovery is a critical consideration to the eDiscovery services you provide. Without it, you won’t have an accurate view of your financial status. While today’s turbulent times may put your LSP under more pressure to budget your money more wisely, the truth is you’re always under pressure to make your bottom line and recover eDiscovery costs as quickly as possible. 

As an LSP, you report to clients who need to know they will receive a good ROI when they hire you. On the flip side, when you hire vendors, buy equipment, or lease software, you need to see that quick ROI as well. 

One way to accomplish this is to adopt eDiscovery software solutions that add real value to your business. To do so, you need an eDiscovery solution providing high quality service so you can collect fees from your clients before the solution costs you more than you can charge.

Consider the cost difference a few decades make:  In 1981, the price of a 1GB hard drive was $500K. Today, it’s less than $0.03. 

For eDiscovery data processing, the cost to process 1GB was $2000 just 15 years ago. We process the same data for less than $100. 

By adopting a solution like CloudNine Explore, you can keep your expenses down to offer more value through a cost-effective solution to your clients. This means they’re able to pay you quicker and more dependably so your cost recovery is easy to manage.

The On-Prem vs. Cloud Storage Dilemma 

 While there are many benefits to cloud storage, the cost isn’t as black and white as it once was. Traditionally, if you rented a server versus purchasing one, your initial investment was cheaper. 

Renting a server may be a smart investment if you have no plans to utilize the server long-term. However, as you continue to rent that server, the costs are going to add up, costing you more than if you just purchased the server.  

Renting data storage space from a provider today can be just as expensive as purchasing a new server because providers typically do everything to ensure the server is up-to-date and backed up. While this does make cloud servers a little more robust, you’ll be paying for that service which makes it more expensive from day one. 

CloudNine Explore allows you to securely upload and store relevant data in a single on-prem server. This allows you to have more access and control over your data while lowering your data storage costs. 

Providing Value with eDiscovery System Speed and Accessibility

Speed means everything in eDiscovery. The faster you import the data, the quicker you can move from processing to storage and review. One of the keys to shorter processing time is the use of automation – the greater the automation, the higher the output. 

CloudNine Explore allows you to use automation and leverage multithreading technology so you can use all available processors within the machine to get the most efficiency out of it. 

That’s incredibly useful as oftentimes LSPs utilize unused surplus equipment they have in their inventory to run eDiscovery processing. CloudNine Explore is a great solution in this scenario because it’s flexible and compatible enough to be used on older technology. This reduces the need to buy new equipment. 

Infrastructure Costs and Document Review Services

Infrastructure requirements vary from software to software. Many of the available eDiscovery solutions on the market are complicated and rigid.  And, providers didn’t build their platform with eDiscovery in mind. They built it for other purposes but eventually, they reassigned it to handle eDiscovery. This leaves them with too many restrictive and complicated requirements on their infrastructure. 

The infrastructure supporting CloudNine Explore wasn’t forced to be something it wasn’t. It allows CloudNine Explore to run on anything from simple laptops to state-of-the-art servers. It runs best on a server with some serious horsepower, but it’s still friendly enough to give you the ability to process and cull with less infrastructure investment – whether that’s in the cloud or on your server.  

An eDiscovery software that provides you with the infrastructure flexibility, gets your LSP one step closer to recovering costs quickly.  Learn how to boost margins even more in our eBook here.

Reducing eDiscovery File Size

Many of our competitors offer filtering technology allowing you to reduce your data file size. The only problem is how they’re able to filter your data. Most often, you have to send them the data first, only to cull it down later. Regardless of the smaller file size, you still have to pay to process the entire data file upfront. 

CloudNine Explore allows you to filter and organize the data upfront, culling unnecessary files so you can process only the data you want. This gives you the flexibility and power to control the processing and upfront storage costs. 

Some common filter types include:

  • File type – This lets you focus on specific file types like .doc, .csv, .pdf, .mov or .m4a.
  • Domain – This allows you to search emails to find the ones sent by a specific domain source.
  • Language – This filters documents containing specific languages. Explore currently supports 144 languages including Unicode characters like Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Cyrillic. 

Breaking Down eDiscovery Software Costs

CloudNine Explore has lower software costs for the simple reason that we developed them with a lower price point in mind. Also, we offer loyalty discounts to our clients when they renew their license agreements. We also discount prices when you bundle Explore with other CloudNine solutions like Review.  

While CloudNine is less expensive than a lot of our competition, in the end, it’s all about how you use the solutions. The more efficiently you use the tool, the more value you get out of it and that’s what matters most. 

To see how Explore can help your LSP recover costs quicker and more effectively, schedule a free demo with CloudNine today.

Insourcing Vs. Outsourcing Your eDiscovery Review Process

While eDiscovery may seem a tedious process, it’s critically important to your courtroom success!  A ruling may be made solely on the content found in one corporate executive’s email.   The requisite rests in the confidence of a trusted system to collect and review relevant documents so both sides can build their case. 

However, when it comes to processing the data collection, many organizations differ on the best method for eDiscovery. 

Whether you decide to insource or outsource your eDiscovery, CloudNine Review is made can assist you in closing cases quickly. 

Discovering The Differences Between Insourcing and Outsourcing eDiscovery

Insourcing is defined as the delegation of operations or tasks within an organization to an internal unit. This refers to both the technology and the people performing the tasks. 

Outsourcing is when you transfer the day-to-day responsibility of those tasks outside your organization to an external service provider. This external service provider provides both the technology and the personnel required to perform the tasks. 

Depending on your organization’s core competencies and business model, insourcing may not be the best choice to handle your eDiscovery tasks. For example, law firms do not focus on providing technology solutions to their clients, so it may be difficult to justify the financial commitment of building an entire infrastructure and hiring a technology team.

However, many organizations may still prefer to insource their eDiscovery. Ten years ago, cloud services were still in their infancy so insourcing was the only real option. While small and mid-sized organizations struggled, larger firms invested in the infrastructure needed to win their cases.

Today, those with the infrastructure still in place choose to contain insourcing because it’s already paid off, which means no additional hosting or processing fees. But for new organizations just getting on their feet, investing in eDiscovery infrastructure may be a costly risk.  Maintaining infrastructure is costly for organizations with internal eDiscovery resources as well.  A cloud-based solution reduces the cost burden for new and established organizations seeking eDiscovery solutions.

How Insourcing and Outsourcing eDiscovery Affects Your ROI

For firms that insource their eDiscovery review, there’s a huge investment of money and time into making an eDiscovery environment a viable solution, such as:

  • Infrastructure Development
  • System Maintenance
  • IT Support Staff
  • Review Attorneys

When you outsource your eDiscovery process, you only pay on a per-project basis.

When you insource your eDiscovery process, you are paying to keep your infrastructure running and up-to-date on the latest technologies, which will require maintenance and labor. With ransomware hackers running rampant, labor shortages from COVID-19, and necessary system upgrades to keep your network from crashing, costs can become erratic and drastically change from month to month. 

Outsourcing makes it easier for your law firm to control costs since you are only concerned with paying for what you need when the cases come along.

The success of your eDiscovery review process lies in your ability to recover costs quickly, learn how to optimize your cost recovery in our eBook, which you can download here.

Are the Benefits of Insourcing Worth the Cost?

When it comes down to it, there’s really only one primary benefit to insourcing your eDiscovery review. It gives you complete and total control over your data processing. You do not have to worry about where your data is being stored or if you can access it on your schedule. It’s on-prem and ready whenever you need it. 

Let’s consider insourcing from a financial standpoint. If you want to develop your own insourced eDiscovery solution, this is what you’re looking at: 

  • The profit margins for hosting and processing fees have eroded significantly in the past 10 years. It used to cost $500 to process a single gigabyte of data. Today, it’s only around $30.
  • You will probably have to develop a custom piece of software or build a new hosting platform, which means you will need to hire at least one developer if you don’t have one on the payroll already. And according to Glassdoor, the average salary for a software developer is around $108,000 a year. This doesn’t include the additional burdens on IT to keep the system up-to-date and secure.
  • Of course, you could hire a software development company to develop new software or hosting platform but that won’t be cheap, either. It’ll be somewhere in the range of $50K and $250K. 
  • And don’t forget about the legal team you’ll need to assemble to do the actual eDiscovery review. 

Overall, you’re looking at a hefty investment. There may not  be enough financial incentive to justify spending the money to develop your own internal infrastructure. 

An Outsourced eDiscovery Solution That Makes Financial Sense

CloudNine Review offers outsourcing eDiscovery solutions that are fast, easy to use, and, most important, cost-efficient. Simply upload your documents and begin the review process in minutes, earning yourself an impressive ROI with these benefits:

  • Unlimited Users: Unlike other eDiscovery providers, we don’t charge you for every single user you add to the database. It’s a flat fee, allowing you the freedom to add as many users as you need.
  • Flexible Infrastructure: Our network is designed to handle hard-working organizations like yours. Our infrastructure can support a thousand attorneys reviewing the same data collection simultaneously. If you wanted to do that in-house, you’d be investing a lot of time and money to spin up the additional infrastructure to handle it. 
  • No Long-Term Contracts: Just pay for your eDiscovery services at a month-to-month rate. No hidden agendas or commitments. 

There’s also no difference in the quality or legality of documents collected and reviewed, as the processes are the same. The only difference is who did the work – an in-house group or a trusted provider like CloudNine. 

If you’re ready to hand over your internal eDiscovery tasks to a dedicated company that specializes in streamlining your discovery, investigation, and audit processes, reach out to CloudNine and request a free demo today.

Five Features to Look for in an eDiscovery Review Solution

When considering which legal document review platform to implement, there are many features and functions to take into consideration, in addition to key stakeholders’ opinions. Commonly, the biggest challenges encountered during eDiscovery review include unpredictable pricing and poor training support.

As the cost of document review can range from $10,000 to upwards of $1 million in annual fees, it’s critical to select an experienced vendor with demonstrated strengths in performance abilities including:

  1. Speed
  2. Real-Time Tracking
  3. Support & Training
  4. Flexibility
  5. Return on Investment

Before you choose your next eDiscovery review solution, consider five advantages of CloudNine Review to help your law firm operate more efficiently.

Ready to see our five prerequisites for an efficient eDiscovery review process in action? Book a CloudNine Review demo today.

Legal Document Review Made Possible with Expedited Processing

The faster your eDiscovery solution, the quicker you’ll understand the case.   Knowing the facts before the other side can have a huge benefit, especially on your initial discovery call or at a deposition. In addition, eDiscovery speed can help you:

  • Reduce your spending
  • File faster 
  • Settle sooner

CloudNine Review provides the type of speed to change an entire case strategy by shortening the path to critical case data. 

As a self-service, on-demand application, CloudNine Review let’s you start your project any time, any where. With remote document review, you can even use your smartphone or tablet, with a simple, easy-to-use interface.  The result enables you to accelerate your timeline, review documents on the fly, and control basic or complex productions. 

Real-Time Tracking Is Pivotal For eDiscovery Firms

By determining the number of documents you process every hour, you can project your potential spend for the case and staff up or down, depending on your specific needs at the time. You can also establish a timeline and the confidence to hit important critical dates. Real-time tracking is a critical function of the review process allowing you to track progress and manage your budget accurately throughout.

By tracking changes in real-time, CloudNine Review displays updates as they occur so everyone sees the change immediately. If you’re worried about users overriding each other, don’t be. With full auditing on both the document level and system level, you’ll know who made the last changes and if it’s part of a pattern. 

And, with visibility to track individual users, you’ll gain insights to how your team is using Review.  For example, if a specific user is tagging documents incorrectly, you can turn the data into a coaching moment so your team knows what they’re looking for and how to process it. 

Support & Training: Providing eDiscovery Teams the Support They Need

We know how frustrating it can be to operate a software solution without support or training.   For this reason, CloudNine Review offers both Self-Service and Self-Service Plus to our clients.

With our Self-Service model, you have access to a service resource to lend aid if you are stuck.

The Self-Service Plus model allows you to leverage our entire services team and the hands-on support to load, review and prepare your data for production. 

CloudNine also provides both live and on-demand training which includes video tutorials. With the live training, you have access to both user and admin training courses. With a concentrated course outline, our average user training usually lasts 30-60 minutes so you’ll be able to get started on your first case in no time. For users with previous experience in review applications, you may not even need to go through our full training before you’re able to get to work. 

With your eDiscovery team trained and ready, you are one step closer to optimizing your eDiscovery cost recovery. Discover how you can create a more profitable review process in our eBook: Optimize eDiscovery Cost Recovery.

Flexibility With A Cloud-Based eDiscovery Software — Built With Your Team In Mind

CloudNine offers a uniquely flexible solution to help you take advantage of both cloud-based processing and on-prem storage. This flexibility is helpful when litigation is paused or delayed.  And, since costs to store data in the cloud can get expensive for both your firm and clients, you can move your data to on-prem storage thereby removing the potential for high hosting fees charged by other cloud-based eDiscovery software solutions. 

Reviewing large datasets can be tough when you don’t have an easy way to break them down. Custom batching can help you break large datasets into smaller and more manageable batches you can then assign to your team. This helps you get through the documents faster and prevents documents from being reviewed by multiple users. 

Advanced reporting also helps you be more efficient by tracking user progress including monitoring the average documents reviewed per hour. If the average is 75 with only one person reviewing 250 documents an hour, this indicates an area for improvement.  A quick investigation might reveal their dataset included an excessive amount of logo files or they may not fully comprehend their task and need more specific instructions. 

eDiscovery Review Software Providing the ROI You Need

It’s important to remember no matter what you do, your law firm is still a business and it needs to be run in an efficient and effective manner.

CloudNine offers an all-inclusive subscription with everything you need for a successful eDiscovery review.

  • Data Processing
  • Data Filtering
  • User-Friendly Interface
  • Review Sets
  • Customer Batching
  • Data Storage
  • Technical Support
  • Certified Training

However, we recognize there are times your caseload might not fit into our traditional model. That’s why we offer a flexible pricing model to help when you have longer-duration cases with heavier upfront work. To determine which pricing model works best for you, there are three things we consider:

  • The expected level of filtering
  • Duration of the case
  • Number of documents expected for review

While some cases require a review of every single document, others only pull documents filtered through a very specific targeted term. Knowing which helps us guide you to the right pricing plan. 

When choosing the eDiscovery review solution that best suits your needs, remember that CloudNine Review always delivers speedy processing, real-time tracking, support, training, flexibility, and return on investment. 

If you’re ready to see how it can help you, request a free demo today.