eDiscovery Daily Blog
Working Successfully with eDiscovery and Litigation Support Service Providers: Other Evaluation Criteria
In the last posts in this blog series, we talked about evaluating service provider pricing, quality, scalability and flexibility. There are a few other things you may wish to look at as well, that may be especially significant for large, long-term projects or relationships. Those things are:
- Litigation Experience: Select a service provider that has litigation experience versus general business experience. A non-litigation service provider that does scanning — for example — may be able to technically meet your requirements. They are probably not, however, accustomed to the inflexible schedules and changing priorities that are commonplace in litigation work.
- Corporate Profile and Tenure: For a large project, be sure to select a service provider that’s been around for a while and has a proven track record. You want to be confident that the service provider that starts your project will be around to finish your project.
- Security and Confidentiality: You want to ensure that your documents, data, and information are secure and kept confidential. This means that you require a secure physical facility, secure systems, and appropriate confidentiality guidelines and agreements.
- SaaS Service Providers: For them, you need to evaluate the technology functionality and ensure that it includes the features you require, that those features are easy to access and to use, and that access, system reliability, system speed, and system security meet your requirements.
- Facility Location and Accessibility: For many projects and many types of services, it won’t be necessary to spend time on the project site. For other projects, that might not be the case. For example, if a service provide is staffing a large document review project at its facility, the litigation team may need to spend time at the facility overseeing work and doing quality control reviews. In such a case, the geographic location and the facility’s access to airports and hotels may be a consideration.
A lot goes into selecting the right service provider for a project, and it’s worth the time and effort to do a careful, thorough evaluation. In the next posts in this series, we’ll discuss the vendor evaluation and selection process.
What has been your experience with evaluating and selecting service providers? What evaluation criteria have you found to be most important? Please share any comments you might have and let us know if you’d like to know more about an eDiscovery topic.