Our Insights on eDiscovery

Yesterday, we started a list of questions to ask when you are doing a reference check. That list included general project questions, questions about communicating with the vendor, and questions about costs. Here are some questions aimed at uncovering information on the quality of the vendor’s work.

Getting good information about a vendor in a reference check is a skill worth developing. As a starting point, you should be armed with a good set of questions. Don’t limit yourself to the list, though. A good reference-check call will be interactive and answers to some questions will probably prompt additional questions. Here’s a good starting point list that might apply to any type of vendor or service you are inquiring about.

As eDiscovery Daily has done in the past, we have periodically interviewed various thought leaders in eDiscovery and legal technology to provide insight as to trends in the industry for our readers to consider. Recently, I was able to interview Jeffrey Brandt, Editor of the Pinhawk Law Technology Daily Digest and columnist for Legal IT Professionals. I had stated that Jeff’s interview will be published this Friday, April 22, but forgot that this Friday is Good Friday (no blog post that day, sorry!). So, Jeff’s interview will be published next Monday, April 25 instead. Mark your calendars!

Many of you may have heard about the FBI cracking down on the three largest online gambling sites in the past few days, as the owners of those sites in the United States have been indicted and charged with bank fraud, money laundering and illegal gambling offenses and the sites have been essentially shut down in the US. Restraining orders have been issued against more than 75 bank accounts in 14 countries used by the poker companies. Many US customers of these sites are now scrambling to try to get their funds out of the sites and finding it difficult to do so. So what? This is an eDiscovery blog, right? What does an Internet gambling crack down have to do with eDiscovery?

Yesterday, we talked about the importance of checking references when considering eDiscovery and Litigation Support Service Providers. In the next blogs in this series, I’m going to suggest some questions you may consider asking when doing a reference check. First, however, let me make some general suggestions.

Over the years, I’ve been asked many times to serve as a reference for vendors with which I’ve worked. And, I’ve taken many reference-check phone calls. More often than not, those calls were less efficient and productive than they could have been — because they weren’t planned and good questions were not asked. In the next blogs in this series I’ll make some suggestions for doing an effective reference check.