Our Insights on eDiscovery

“Blue Horseshoe Loves BlueStar”. Anyone remember that famous quote from Charlie Sheen (when he was known for his acting) in the movie Wall Street? Well, now eDiscovery buffs with a smartphone love BlueStar too. BlueStar Case Solutions, Inc. (BlueStar), just launched EDD Toolkit, which is a free eDiscovery app for smartphones. The app features a Cost Estimator, Time Estimator, Conversion Table and Glossary for common eDiscovery questions with regards to ESI processing, document review and production.

Throughout the life of the project, you will implement some standard project management techniques for monitoring quality and ensuring that questions are resolved efficiently. We’re going to cover those techniques in the next blog posts in this series. There are, however, a couple of special steps you should take at the beginning of a project to ensure that it gets off to a smooth start.

Today’s thought leader is Tom Gelbmann. Tom is Principal of Gelbmann & Associates, LLC, co-author of the Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey and co-founder of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM). Since 1993, Gelbmann & Associates, LLC has helped law firms and Corporate Law Departments realize the full benefit of their investments in Information Technology. As today is Valentine’s Day, consider this interview with Tom as eDiscoveryDaily’s Valentine’s Day present to you!

As a member of the EDRM Metrics Project for the past four years, I have seen several accomplishments by the group to provide an effective means of measuring the time, money and volumes associated with eDiscovery activities. Now, we need your help for an information gathering exercise. We are currently conducting a Metrics Privilege survey to get a sense throughout the industry as to typical volumes and percentages of privileged documents within a collection.

Yesterday, we discussed the assembling the project team for document review. It’s also important that the review team gets good training. As a starting point, prepare a training manual for each team member that includes this information…

l need. Your goal is to get the work done as cost effectively as possible – using less expensive personnel where possible — without sacrificing work quality or the utility of the work product.