Our Insights on eDiscovery

Many of you have Android phones. I do, as well. As you may know, Android is Google’s operating system for phones and Android phones have become extraordinarily popular. However, it may be a failure in searching that ironically may cost Google billions in its litigation with Oracle over the Android operating system.

In the past few weeks we’ve talked about various marketing techniques and mechanisms that — in my experience — work well in a law firm. In closing, I have just a few additional thoughts I’d like to share with you on the subject.

In the last post in this series, we began talking about marketing techniques for keeping the customers you have. The first point we covered was continuously reminding your customers of the services that you offer. The second thing you need to do is to look for new ways to help the customers that you have.

With document review estimated to up to 80% of the total cost of the eDiscovery process and the amount of data in the world growing at an exponential rate, it’s no wonder that many firms are turning to technology to make the review process more efficient. How the documents are organized can make a big difference in the efficiency of review, not only in saving costs, but also improving accuracy. This process of organizing documents with similar content into “clusters” helps each reviewer make quicker review decisions and also promotes consistency in the review process.

The trustee responsible for coordinating the recovery of assets and data involved in Bernard L. (“Bernie”) Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi fraud investigation is presently seeking to secure special masters and create an “eData room” to ensure that the enormous volume of data accumulated during this worldwide investigation is collected and retained.

Retired Washington DC superior court judge Richard Levie was recently appointed as a special master to oversee the eDiscovery demands of an ongoing high profile acquisition case. The DOJ and AT&T have jointly requested (and US district Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle appointed) Levie as special master to resolve any matters involving electronic evidence in the case focused on the $39 billion proposed acquisition of T-Mobile by AT&T. The assignment of special masters has become a growing trend to help streamline the discovery process.

Yesterday, we concluded our discussion about getting new customers. Today, we begin discussing how to keep the customers you already have. Getting repeat business from your clients is essential. If every client only used your services once, at some point you’d be out of business. You need to focus, therefore, on getting repeat business. Here’s how.

Last week, we started talking about techniques and mechanisms for one-on-one marketing to individual attorneys and litigation teams in your firm. Here are a few more tips.