Our Insights on eDiscovery

Many organizations add email disclaimers to their emails for legal protection to attempt to protect themselves from legal threats such as breach of confidentiality or accidental breach of privilege. However, when it comes time to collect and search email collections for confidentiality and privilege, these email footers can wreak havoc with those searches. Searches for the words “confidential” or “privileged” will essentially be rendered useless as they will literally retrieve every email with the email disclaimer footer in it. So, what to do?

In the last several posts in this series, we talked about evaluating and selecting vendors for a preferred vendor program. Once that’s done, you still have a bit of work to do before rolling out your program. You need to establish a mechanism for on-going evaluation of the vendors on your list. This is an important component of the program – you need to monitor the work of the vendors on your list to ensure that they continue to meet your requirements and live up to your expectations. Here’s the first step in developing this part of the program.

A famous “philosopher” once said, “I got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell”. It seems that many corporations and law firms “got a fever” and “the only prescription is more CLOUD”. As we noted earlier this week, Forrester has forecast that the global Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) “cloud” computing market will grow from 40.7 billion dollars in 2011 to more than 241 billion dollars by 2020 — a six-fold increase. So, there are the predictions. The question is why?

Yesterday, we covered the first couple of steps in establishing a law firm preferred vendor program. Here are the next steps in the process.

Last week, we talked about the components of a preferred vendor program. Establishing a program is a “project”, and should be approached with a solid plan of action. First, identify who will put the program together. The team should be made up of experienced litigation support professionals and it should incorporate input from litigation team members. Once the team is in place, you need a step-by-step approach for moving forward.

Yesterday, we talked about a couple of different ways in which law firms work with litigation support and eDiscovery vendors. And, we talked about the advantages to a centralized approach and establishing a preferred vendor program. What, exactly, is a preferred vendor program? To most people, it’s having a list of pre-approved vendors that that can be called on as the need arises. That is certainly the core of a preferred vendor program. But, a good program goes a bit further.

Law firms take different approaches to working with vendors. In some firms, individual litigation teams evaluate, select and manage vendors on a case-by-case basis. Other firms take a centralized approach where all vendor activities are coordinated and managed by a centralized litigation support department. And taking that a step further, many firms that use a centralized approach, establish a preferred vendor program. What works best? That probably depends on the culture and organization of a law firm.