Our Insights on eDiscovery

It starts when you are evaluating and selecting a vendor. Based on your review of a vendor’s qualifications, procedures and technology, along with feedback you’ve received from references, make sure you select a vendor that is likely to do high quality work and that has a good track record. Once a project is underway, look at the vendor’s work to ensure it meets your expectations. This is especially important with work that is labor-intensive. In fact, there are three levels of quality control that you should be doing.

Of all the problems you might have to report to an attorney, the worst may be that you are going to miss a production deadline. Deadlines get missed because document or data collections are larger than expected, the task is more difficult than expected, sufficient technical resources aren’t allocated to the project, or the project simply isn’t staffed properly. Good communication up front with a vendor, and good monitoring throughout a project can minimize the chance of missing deadlines.

Law firms and corporations alike tend to keep data storage devices well beyond what their compliance requirements or business needs actually dictate. These so-called “skeletons in the closet” pose a major problem when the entity gets sued or subpoenaed. All that dusty data is suddenly potentially discoverable. Legal counsel can be proactive and initiate responsible handling of this legacy data by defining a new, defensible information governance process.

Unfortunately, it’s just not possible to know up-front precisely what a litigation support or eDiscovery project will cost. There are too many unknowns, and, therefore, too many opportunities for surprises regarding costs. You can, however, avoid some of those surprises with good upfront communication with the vendor. Here are some steps you can take to prevent surprises and control costs.

So many law firm litigation support folks that I know have an unpleasant war story or two about a project they did with a vendor. I usually find these frustrating, because more often than not, the problems could have been avoided. Taking a few preventative steps early on, and doing a good job of monitoring project activity can make all the difference. In the next few posts in this series, we’re going to look at ways to make the projects you do with vendors run smoother.

A little over a month ago, I noted that we hadn’t missed a (business) day yet in publishing a post for the blog. That streak almost came to an end last week. As I often do in the early mornings before getting ready for work, I spent some time searching for articles to read and identifying potential blog topics and found a link on a site related to “New Federal Rules”. Curious, I clicked on it and…up popped a pop-up window from our virus checking software (AVG Anti-Virus, or so I thought) that the site had found a file containing a “trojan horse” program. The odd thing about the pop-up window is that there was no “Fix” button to fix the trojan horse. So, I chose the best available option to move it to the vault. Then, all hell broke loose.