eDiscovery Daily Blog
Working Successfully with eDiscovery and Litigation Support Service Providers: Capacity, Scalability, and Flexibility
One thing, however, most likely won’t change: your schedule. Regardless of how big the job gets, you still have production deadlines and interim milestones to meet. You, therefore, need a vendor that has the capacity to handle your work, that can scale up with the resources needed to deal with increased volume, and that can be flexible to adapt to changing needs and priorities. What’s important today, may take a backseat to something more important that arises tomorrow.
The best way to deal with this is open communication with the service provider in the evaluation process. Don’t limit your questions to computing power and capacity. That’s just part of the picture, and that’s the easy part. You want a service provider who will go the extra mile and work with you to get you what you need, when you need it. The technology doesn’t do that.
In your conversations with service providers, provide information on what you do know, what you are assuming, and what you are guessing. Ask how changes in the volume or requirements will impact their ability to meet your schedule. Ask about their ability to scale up. Ask about their procedures for changing priorities in processing a collection. Give them best and worst case scenarios and ask for commitments for either situation. Ask about after-hours resources and their ability and willingness to run multiple shifts if that’s needed. And ask for references — specifically for people who had last minute, dramatic changes to the scope of a project.
What has been your experience with service providers meeting your schedule requirements? Do you have good or bad experiences you can tell us about? Please share any comments you might have and let us know if you’d like to know more about an eDiscovery topic.