eDiscovery Daily Blog
Working Successfully with eDiscovery and Litigation Support Service Providers: Establishing a Preferred Vendor Program
Last week, we talked about the components of a preferred vendor program. Establishing a program is a “project”, and should be approached with a solid plan of action. First, identify who will put the program together. The team should be made up of experienced litigation support professionals and it should incorporate input from litigation team members. Once the team is in place, you need a step-by-step approach for moving forward.
In the next few posts in this blog series, I’ll suggest an approach. Here are the first couple of steps:
1. Create a list of the services to be provided by vendors. You may need vendors to provide a variety of services – services that the firm’s litigation support department does not provide, and services for projects that exceed the capacity of the firm’s litigation support department offerings. Your list may look something like this:
- ESI collection
- ESI processing
- Tiffing
- Photocopying and scanning
- Coding / auto-coding
- Hosting and providing online review platforms
- Language translation
- Document review staffing and management
- Court reporting / deposition transcription
- Trial support services
2. Get input from litigation team members on preferences and priorities. Survey attorneys and paralegals in the firm to determine what is most important to them. For each service on the list, ask questions about pricing expectations, overall schedule requirements, and expectations on deliverables. Ask them if they’ve worked with vendors that should be considered. This is an important step. First, it ensures that your evaluation process will take into account what’s most important to the users. Second, litigation department members are more likely to embrace a program that they participated in developing.
We’ll continue with the next steps tomorrow.
Have you developed a preferred vendor program for your firm? How did you do it? Please share any comments you might have and let us know if you’d like to know more about an eDiscovery topic.