Our Insights on eDiscovery

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).

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.