Our Insights on eDiscovery

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).

In my efforts to stay abreast of current developments in eDiscovery (and also to identify great blog post ideas!), I subscribe to and read a number of different sources for information. That includes some of the “web crawling” services that identify articles, press releases and other publications such as the Pinhawk Law Technology Daily Digest, which is one of my favorite resources and always has interesting stories to read. I also have a Google Alert set up to deliver stories on “e-Discovery” via a daily email. But, sometimes these resources don’t retrieve what you might expect.

Florida is currently preparing to adopt a set of changes to its Rules of Civil Procedure with regard to discovery of ESI, closely founded on the changes made to the Federal Rules in 2006. Based on the recommendation of the Florida Civil Rules Electronic Discovery Subcommittee, the full Rules Committee voted on implementing changes now rather than waiting until 2013 when these rules would normally be considered.

As we discussed yesterday, successful marketing of a litigation support / eDiscovery department within a law firm is a significant “key to success” to the success of such a department. For marketing efforts to be successful in a law firm, they have to be approached with the right “mind-set”. This may require making some adjustments to how litigation support / eDiscovery department members think about marketing, and perhaps even some adjustments to how the department operates.

You may have seen the movie “Field of Dreams”. In that film, Ray – the main character – builds a baseball field on his farm in Iowa. Famous, deceased baseball players like Shoeless Joe Jackson appear to play ball on the field, and fans travel from all over to watch the ball games. Throughout the movie, a voice tells Ray “If you build it, they will come”. If you look this film up in a movie directory, it’s categorized as a “fantasy”. And this statement is a fantasy too. This just doesn’t work in real life. We have to do more than build something.