eDiscovery Daily Blog
Working Successfully with eDiscovery and Litigation Support Service Providers: Dotting the I’s and Crossing the T’s
Yesterday, we talked about information to include in a Request for Proposal (RFP) to request eDiscovery and litigation support services. Before moving forward with a service provider for a project, there are a few due diligence steps you should take to protect yourself and your case-sensitive information.
First, it may be appropriate to ask the service provider to verify that it does not have a conflict of interest. For many eDiscovery services, this step may not be necessary. If, however, you are asking a service provider to assist with substantive consultative help, you want to ensure that – at a minimum – it is not providing similar services to the other side in the litigation.
Once you’ve established that there is no conflict, you want to protect case information that you provide to the vendor – information in the form of communication and information in the documents and data. Require that the vendor sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) before communicating or transmitting sensitive and confidential information.
And finally, you and the vendor should both sign off on a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that clearly defines the work to which you’ve agreed. A Service Level Agreement should include — at a minimum:
- A complete description of each service to be performed
- A complete description of each deliverable
- A description of agreed upon performance levels (guarantees and warranties provided by the service provider; this may be in the form of quality assurance guarantees, system availability and downtime, and so on).
In addition, a service level agreement might include the following information
- Pricing for services
- Billing information
- Contact information
One other important “due diligence” step is checking references. We’ll cover that in the next posts in this series. I’ll give you some suggestions for doing an effective reference check that will get at the information you need to know.
What due diligence steps do you take with a service provider? Please share any comments you might have and let us know if you’d like to know more about an eDiscovery topic.