Our Insights on eDiscovery

There are a handful of judges whose pronouncements on anything eDiscovery-related are bound to get legal technologists talking. Judge Andrew Peck, United States magistrate judge for the Southern District of New York is one of them. His recent article, Search, Forward, published in Law Technology News, is one of the few judicial pronouncements on the use of predictive coding and has sparked a lively debate.

The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) Project, created to address the lack of standards and guidelines in the electronic discovery market, is now in its seventh year of operation. This week, the EDRM Mid-Year meeting has taken place in St. Paul, MN (giving some of us a chance to break out our winter clothes early!). Twice a year, in May and October, eDiscovery professionals who are EDRM members meet to continue the process of working together on various standards projects. Here are some highlights from this week’s meeting.

Yesterday, we covered a couple of ‘big-picture’ marketing mechanisms and techniques that work well in a law firm. Here are a few more.

Your marketing efforts should be aimed at two goals: getting new customers and keeping existing customers. We’ll start with marketing techniques for getting new customers. We’ll cover ‘big-picture’ marketing activities – that is, marketing activities aimed at spreading the word about how your department can help litigators in the firm. And, we’ll talk about one-on-one marketing to individual attorneys and litigation teams.

Last week’s article on Law Technology News summarizes the message put forward by several speakers at the fifth annual Colorado Association of Litigation Support Professionals E-Discovery Summit, held on October 7, 2011. In her article “E-Discovery ‘Command’ Culture Must Collapse”, Monica Bay discusses the old “command” style of eDiscovery, with a senior partner leading his “troops” like General George Patton – a model that summit speakers agree is “doomed to failure” – and reports on the findings put forward by judges and litigators that the time has come for true collaboration.

In the last two posts, we’ve talked about some “marketing mind-set” principles that are appropriate for a litigation support / eDiscovery department. There’s just one more for you to consider.

Last week, we started talking about the right “marketing mind-set” for a litigation support / eDiscovery department. Here are a couple more mind-set adjustments you may need to make.

While mergers and acquisitions of major eDiscovery providers (such as Symantec’s acquisition of Clearwell and HP’s acquisition of Autonomy) dominate the headlines, the majority of eDiscovery providers are actually small to midsized companies that provide a full range of services from coast to coast. To enable the small/midsized providers to compete with the eDiscovery “bohemoths” of the world, Jerry Correia and Greg Bayless formed the Legal Service Providers Association (LSPA).