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Review

eDiscovery in a Pandemic: How to Adapt to Turbulent Times

There’s no question COVID-19 continues to have a huge impact on the way we live and work. With the new Delta variant surging among the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike, the number of infections is rising once again. Unprecedented challenges are impacting law firms and legal document reviewers as well. 

From March 2020 to January 2021, New York City held only nine criminal jury trials.

For the first time in history, court trials dropped 99%  from the previous year in the country’s largest criminal jurisdictions. This is not an isolated occurrence as courts closed or severely reduced their caseloads to help stop the spread of the virus. This meant cases that should have closed were left open indefinitely, forcing law firms to keep their eDiscovery accounts open for longer than expected. 

Making matters worse, law firm clients found themselves unable to pay their invoices as the unemployment rate topped 14.8% in April 2020. While the economy has begun to recover, the unemployment rate still remained high at 5.8% in May 2021. This loss in client income had a predictable downstream effect on legal cases. 

Another consequence brought about by the lockdowns was the disruption of electronic discovery data collection. Law firms and their clients began shipping hard drives all over the country. New strategies had to be developed around data collection as document review service providers had to order hard drives, copy relevant ESI onto the hard drives, and then deliver them to the client. 

All of these challenges had a direct impact on revenue and forced expense cuts by collections, attending conferences, and certainly inviting clients to onsite meetings.

Ultimately, law firms will have to adopt new solutions or rethink old ones in order to thrive in this new, post-COVID world. The best way to do this? Adopt an agile, remote review process as part of your eDiscovery solution; learn how CloudNine Explore can help you adapt to the everchanging times here.

Be Prepared to Move Your eDiscovery Operations Remote 

When federal, state, and local governments began shutting down courthouses, law firms followed suit and sent their people home to work remotely. While every firm was different, size played a big part in how easy or difficult the transition was. 

For smaller firms, it didn’t take much – just a few tweaks to their infrastructure to allow remote access. Larger firms faced a bigger challenge as they had a lot more pieces to move to give everyone remote access to the shared drives and files they needed to do their jobs. 

In order to prepare for another shutdown or even a natural disaster preventing you from opening your office, CloudNine can help you convert from your standard in-office eDiscovery environment to a remote eDiscovery environment working easily and quickly. 

For firms already accustomed to interacting with the on-prem eDiscovery environment, they’ll automatically have full remote access to CloudNine Explore. They just need to have their network turned on and accessible. 

Some legal teams may not have the on-prem infrastructure in place to support that many users in one project at once, especially those teams that are large and spread. 

For these situations, we offer CloudNine Explore via our cloud so you can allow more users to access your data using our infrastructure at no additional infrastructure cost to them. With internet connectivity, you can access your CloudNine projects from any device, anywhere in the world. 

Add More Value to Your eDiscovery Retainer

Retainers are a good way to ensure clients are capable of meeting their financial obligations to your law firm. While most retainers are based on a specific dollar amount, some are established to run month-to-month or even year-to-year. These multi-year agreements help you establish a consistent revenue stream. To capture the best retainers, you need to have a reputation for being hard-working, committed, fair, and, most important, effective. 

Effective eDiscovery solutions bring value to your services beyond what other law firms have to offer. Highly efficient and secure, CloudNine Explore can eliminate duplicate or irrelevant files so you can focus on the documents that matter. With filtering tools that allow you to reduce the cost of processing by reducing the file size, you offer better value by providing more services for the price of your client’s retainer.

Improve Your ROI Through Your eDiscovery Solution

To help improve your services and increase value to your clients, you’ll want to understand how to maximize efficiency in your eDiscovery. CloudNine models out the cost of the solution versus the return you’ll get on your investment in the form of:

  • Data security
  • Cost reductions
  • Control over your data
  • Processing speed 

Plus, CloudNine partners with you to better understand your goals in order to offer a realistic solution so you know if you commit to X, Y, and Z today, you’re more likely to experience a higher return on your investment tomorrow. 

CloudNine also helps you level the playing field between larger law firms with astronomical budgets and smaller, more cost-conscience firms. By leveraging the solutions offered, you can access the same level of technology and services as larger law firms without investing in the infrastructure to host it. 

Learn how CloudNine Explore can help your firm be prepared for turbulent times, giving you added value to offer your clients, the ability to work remotely more effectively, and the confidence you need to invest in new solutions to get better ROI. Schedule a free demo with CloudNine today.

The Hybrid eDiscovery Solution: The Best Of Both Worlds

When deciding on the most efficient processes to run eDiscovery in your organization, the options are nearly limitless with hundreds of products and service providers vying for your attention.

Not all document review solutions are the same. Before you commit to your eDiscovery solution, you need to determine whether you would like to perform eDiscovery in-house, outsource it or do a bit of both.

Regardless of which path you take, CloudNine can provide you with a solution that is perfectly right-sized for you, learn more about CloudNine’s review solutions here.

What is eDiscovery Insourcing?

Insourcing is the delegation of a task or operation to a specialized unit within your organization rather than a third party. For legal service providers and large law firms, this includes both the technology used to perform legal data collection and people assigned to collect and review electronic discovery documents.

Insourcing is the traditional method for eDiscovery. Ten years ago, cloud solutions weren’t widely used for eDiscovery due to cost and the fact that most professionals were not aware or comfortable with it yet. Larger law firms invested heavily in developing an in-house infrastructure and software to process and review electronic documents.

Today, the organizations with the infrastructure already in place continue to insource their eDiscovery because it allows them to control both the cost and the data. Typically, these organizations are large law firms.

Benefits of insourcing your eDiscovery:

  • No data hosting or processing fees
  • Complete control over data collection
  • Protection from cybersecurity attacks on external parties

100% control means 100% responsibility. With this responsibility comes the cost of maintaining your eDiscovery environment which includes hiring IT professionals and updating the infrastructure regularly.

If your organization chooses to insource your eDiscovery process, you will need to hire a software company to develop your new software or hosting platform. Of course, you can avoid this if you already have a software engineer on the payroll.

In addition, your new eDiscovery software will need a robust infrastructure to support it. This requires a large investment of capital. If you already have the infrastructure in place, you may have to expand it before you are ready if your organization scales quicker than you’re prepared for.

Lastly, an insourced eDiscovery solution requires trained professionals to make it operational. Not only will you need a team of dedicated attorneys to review the documents, but you’ll need IT staff to maintain the network, software, and hosting platform.

Interested in learning more about the pros and cons of corporate legal insourcing? Check out our blog, Insourcing vs. Outsourcing Your eDiscovery Review Process.

What is eDiscovery Outsourcing?

Outsourcing is the transfer of day-to-day operations of a business function or task to an external service provider. For eDiscovery, this means an outside organization is responsible for providing the technology and personnel to collect and review electronic discovery documents.

Because of the high expense associated with maintaining an in-house infrastructure, many legal organizations contract legal service providers or legal technology companies to host and process their eDiscovery documents.

This also means you do not need to keep IT staff or review attorneys on payroll full-time. Instead, your expenses are tied to a few laptops and a reliable connection to the internet.

With less investment in infrastructure, accounting becomes much easier because you’re not looking to make money back on an expensive investment. Your books and budget are simplified, only paying predictable monthly hosting and processing fees.

Other benefits to outsourcing include:

  • Up-to-date software patches to protect you from cybersecurity threats
  • Hosting and processing fees are based strictly on volume
  • Data can be culled to reduce the number of documents processed

Outsourcing means you have to frequently communicate with your legal service provider. The more you outsource, the more management you need to ensure communication is being relayed correctly and different pathways mean the odds of miscommunication increases.

Data transfer time could pose a problem if one party is suffering from a connection issue or if a hard drive has to be physically shipped to the service provider for processing.

Also, you’re dependent on the service provider’s availability. If they have a system outage or are the victim of a natural disaster, you’ll potentially lose access to your data.

A Hybrid eDiscovery Solution

For some organizations, one solution- insourcing or outsourcing- may not be suitable. Different challenges require different solutions and those that find themselves in this position can always consider adopting a hybrid eDiscovery solution.

A hybrid eDiscovery solution finds the best balance between your internal and external resources to perform specific business functions or tasks like eDiscovery collection, processing, and review.

For example, you could use insourcing to cull the data before advancing it to your outsourced processing. Or you could reserve your insourced platform to handle smaller data collections while sending larger data loads to your external service provider.

Tasks to consider for your hybrid approach include:

To determine which solution is best suited to perform each task, you need to consider these challenges for each:

  • ROI – How much will the solution cost and is it cost-effective?
  • Time – How quickly will the solution allow you to perform your eDiscovery tasks?
  • Complexity – How complex is your eDiscovery process and what risks are involved with the solution?

By recognizing your specific needs and comparing them to the benefits and drawbacks of each solution, you can determine which solution – insource, outsource, hybrid – works best for your organization.

Regardless of your decision, CloudNine can help guide you to discovering the right eDiscovery solution for you. We offer an all-in-one processing and hosting solution that you can use on-prem or through our cloud-based eDiscovery platform, giving you the option for insourcing, outsource, or hybrid.

To learn more, request a free demo and see how CloudNine can make your eDiscovery solutions more efficient and affordable.

Insourcing Vs. Outsourcing Your eDiscovery Review Process

While eDiscovery may seem a tedious process, it’s critically important to your courtroom success!  A ruling may be made solely on the content found in one corporate executive’s email.   The requisite rests in the confidence of a trusted system to collect and review relevant documents so both sides can build their case. 

However, when it comes to processing the data collection, many organizations differ on the best method for eDiscovery. 

Whether you decide to insource or outsource your eDiscovery, CloudNine Review is made can assist you in closing cases quickly. 

Discovering The Differences Between Insourcing and Outsourcing eDiscovery

Insourcing is defined as the delegation of operations or tasks within an organization to an internal unit. This refers to both the technology and the people performing the tasks. 

Outsourcing is when you transfer the day-to-day responsibility of those tasks outside your organization to an external service provider. This external service provider provides both the technology and the personnel required to perform the tasks. 

Depending on your organization’s core competencies and business model, insourcing may not be the best choice to handle your eDiscovery tasks. For example, law firms do not focus on providing technology solutions to their clients, so it may be difficult to justify the financial commitment of building an entire infrastructure and hiring a technology team.

However, many organizations may still prefer to insource their eDiscovery. Ten years ago, cloud services were still in their infancy so insourcing was the only real option. While small and mid-sized organizations struggled, larger firms invested in the infrastructure needed to win their cases.

Today, those with the infrastructure still in place choose to contain insourcing because it’s already paid off, which means no additional hosting or processing fees. But for new organizations just getting on their feet, investing in eDiscovery infrastructure may be a costly risk.  Maintaining infrastructure is costly for organizations with internal eDiscovery resources as well.  A cloud-based solution reduces the cost burden for new and established organizations seeking eDiscovery solutions.

How Insourcing and Outsourcing eDiscovery Affects Your ROI

For firms that insource their eDiscovery review, there’s a huge investment of money and time into making an eDiscovery environment a viable solution, such as:

  • Infrastructure Development
  • System Maintenance
  • IT Support Staff
  • Review Attorneys

When you outsource your eDiscovery process, you only pay on a per-project basis.

When you insource your eDiscovery process, you are paying to keep your infrastructure running and up-to-date on the latest technologies, which will require maintenance and labor. With ransomware hackers running rampant, labor shortages from COVID-19, and necessary system upgrades to keep your network from crashing, costs can become erratic and drastically change from month to month. 

Outsourcing makes it easier for your law firm to control costs since you are only concerned with paying for what you need when the cases come along.

The success of your eDiscovery review process lies in your ability to recover costs quickly, learn how to optimize your cost recovery in our eBook, which you can download here.

Are the Benefits of Insourcing Worth the Cost?

When it comes down to it, there’s really only one primary benefit to insourcing your eDiscovery review. It gives you complete and total control over your data processing. You do not have to worry about where your data is being stored or if you can access it on your schedule. It’s on-prem and ready whenever you need it. 

Let’s consider insourcing from a financial standpoint. If you want to develop your own insourced eDiscovery solution, this is what you’re looking at: 

  • The profit margins for hosting and processing fees have eroded significantly in the past 10 years. It used to cost $500 to process a single gigabyte of data. Today, it’s only around $30.
  • You will probably have to develop a custom piece of software or build a new hosting platform, which means you will need to hire at least one developer if you don’t have one on the payroll already. And according to Glassdoor, the average salary for a software developer is around $108,000 a year. This doesn’t include the additional burdens on IT to keep the system up-to-date and secure.
  • Of course, you could hire a software development company to develop new software or hosting platform but that won’t be cheap, either. It’ll be somewhere in the range of $50K and $250K. 
  • And don’t forget about the legal team you’ll need to assemble to do the actual eDiscovery review. 

Overall, you’re looking at a hefty investment. There may not  be enough financial incentive to justify spending the money to develop your own internal infrastructure. 

An Outsourced eDiscovery Solution That Makes Financial Sense

CloudNine Review offers outsourcing eDiscovery solutions that are fast, easy to use, and, most important, cost-efficient. Simply upload your documents and begin the review process in minutes, earning yourself an impressive ROI with these benefits:

  • Unlimited Users: Unlike other eDiscovery providers, we don’t charge you for every single user you add to the database. It’s a flat fee, allowing you the freedom to add as many users as you need.
  • Flexible Infrastructure: Our network is designed to handle hard-working organizations like yours. Our infrastructure can support a thousand attorneys reviewing the same data collection simultaneously. If you wanted to do that in-house, you’d be investing a lot of time and money to spin up the additional infrastructure to handle it. 
  • No Long-Term Contracts: Just pay for your eDiscovery services at a month-to-month rate. No hidden agendas or commitments. 

There’s also no difference in the quality or legality of documents collected and reviewed, as the processes are the same. The only difference is who did the work – an in-house group or a trusted provider like CloudNine. 

If you’re ready to hand over your internal eDiscovery tasks to a dedicated company that specializes in streamlining your discovery, investigation, and audit processes, reach out to CloudNine and request a free demo today.

Five Features to Look for in an eDiscovery Review Solution

When considering which legal document review platform to implement, there are many features and functions to take into consideration, in addition to key stakeholders’ opinions. Commonly, the biggest challenges encountered during eDiscovery review include unpredictable pricing and poor training support.

As the cost of document review can range from $10,000 to upwards of $1 million in annual fees, it’s critical to select an experienced vendor with demonstrated strengths in performance abilities including:

  1. Speed
  2. Real-Time Tracking
  3. Support & Training
  4. Flexibility
  5. Return on Investment

Before you choose your next eDiscovery review solution, consider five advantages of CloudNine Review to help your law firm operate more efficiently.

Ready to see our five prerequisites for an efficient eDiscovery review process in action? Book a CloudNine Review demo today.

Legal Document Review Made Possible with Expedited Processing

The faster your eDiscovery solution, the quicker you’ll understand the case.   Knowing the facts before the other side can have a huge benefit, especially on your initial discovery call or at a deposition. In addition, eDiscovery speed can help you:

  • Reduce your spending
  • File faster 
  • Settle sooner

CloudNine Review provides the type of speed to change an entire case strategy by shortening the path to critical case data. 

As a self-service, on-demand application, CloudNine Review let’s you start your project any time, any where. With remote document review, you can even use your smartphone or tablet, with a simple, easy-to-use interface.  The result enables you to accelerate your timeline, review documents on the fly, and control basic or complex productions. 

Real-Time Tracking Is Pivotal For eDiscovery Firms

By determining the number of documents you process every hour, you can project your potential spend for the case and staff up or down, depending on your specific needs at the time. You can also establish a timeline and the confidence to hit important critical dates. Real-time tracking is a critical function of the review process allowing you to track progress and manage your budget accurately throughout.

By tracking changes in real-time, CloudNine Review displays updates as they occur so everyone sees the change immediately. If you’re worried about users overriding each other, don’t be. With full auditing on both the document level and system level, you’ll know who made the last changes and if it’s part of a pattern. 

And, with visibility to track individual users, you’ll gain insights to how your team is using Review.  For example, if a specific user is tagging documents incorrectly, you can turn the data into a coaching moment so your team knows what they’re looking for and how to process it. 

Support & Training: Providing eDiscovery Teams the Support They Need

We know how frustrating it can be to operate a software solution without support or training.   For this reason, CloudNine Review offers both Self-Service and Self-Service Plus to our clients.

With our Self-Service model, you have access to a service resource to lend aid if you are stuck.

The Self-Service Plus model allows you to leverage our entire services team and the hands-on support to load, review and prepare your data for production. 

CloudNine also provides both live and on-demand training which includes video tutorials. With the live training, you have access to both user and admin training courses. With a concentrated course outline, our average user training usually lasts 30-60 minutes so you’ll be able to get started on your first case in no time. For users with previous experience in review applications, you may not even need to go through our full training before you’re able to get to work. 

With your eDiscovery team trained and ready, you are one step closer to optimizing your eDiscovery cost recovery. Discover how you can create a more profitable review process in our eBook: Optimize eDiscovery Cost Recovery.

Flexibility With A Cloud-Based eDiscovery Software — Built With Your Team In Mind

CloudNine offers a uniquely flexible solution to help you take advantage of both cloud-based processing and on-prem storage. This flexibility is helpful when litigation is paused or delayed.  And, since costs to store data in the cloud can get expensive for both your firm and clients, you can move your data to on-prem storage thereby removing the potential for high hosting fees charged by other cloud-based eDiscovery software solutions. 

Reviewing large datasets can be tough when you don’t have an easy way to break them down. Custom batching can help you break large datasets into smaller and more manageable batches you can then assign to your team. This helps you get through the documents faster and prevents documents from being reviewed by multiple users. 

Advanced reporting also helps you be more efficient by tracking user progress including monitoring the average documents reviewed per hour. If the average is 75 with only one person reviewing 250 documents an hour, this indicates an area for improvement.  A quick investigation might reveal their dataset included an excessive amount of logo files or they may not fully comprehend their task and need more specific instructions. 

eDiscovery Review Software Providing the ROI You Need

It’s important to remember no matter what you do, your law firm is still a business and it needs to be run in an efficient and effective manner.

CloudNine offers an all-inclusive subscription with everything you need for a successful eDiscovery review.

  • Data Processing
  • Data Filtering
  • User-Friendly Interface
  • Review Sets
  • Customer Batching
  • Data Storage
  • Technical Support
  • Certified Training

However, we recognize there are times your caseload might not fit into our traditional model. That’s why we offer a flexible pricing model to help when you have longer-duration cases with heavier upfront work. To determine which pricing model works best for you, there are three things we consider:

  • The expected level of filtering
  • Duration of the case
  • Number of documents expected for review

While some cases require a review of every single document, others only pull documents filtered through a very specific targeted term. Knowing which helps us guide you to the right pricing plan. 

When choosing the eDiscovery review solution that best suits your needs, remember that CloudNine Review always delivers speedy processing, real-time tracking, support, training, flexibility, and return on investment. 

If you’re ready to see how it can help you, request a free demo today.

Four Inefficiency Traps to Avoid in Your Legal Document Review Process

For every time-saving, cost-cutting efficiency available in legal document review lives an equal number of challenges and pitfalls which can consume your productivity and budget. For LSPs and law firms, a thorough and effective legal review will depend on more than just data size and solution speed. Navigating successfully through the review process means knowing where you can expedite and streamline your project with efficiency and how to avoid costly mistakes.

Read on to learn about four potential inefficiency traps you can avoid in your next legal review to save time and money:

  1. Document format and storage
  2. Inefficient upload speeds
  3. Duplicate data
  4. Single-user access to documents

Trap 1: Document Format and Storage

One of the first challenges to overcome is determining the best method to consolidate and convert collected data into searchable content. From digital emails and websites to printed letters and hand-written notes, different document formats are collected and stored across several disparate systems. While you may have some stored in Outlook, others could be kept in a binder on your desk.

A legal document review system digitizes and stores every document in one place, allowing you to search and review all documents at the same time. This enables you to apply a search strategy to locate relevant documents quickly and efficiently. It also provides you with the flexibility to view data in different, organized layouts to easily see document attributes such as:

  1. Source
  2. Type
  3. Origin date
  4. Author
  5. Recipients

With all case documents organized and stored on a single platform, LSPs and legal departments can locate and produce responsive content, ranging from scanned documents to email to spreadsheets and more.

Trap 2: Inefficient Upload Speeds

Initiating your review project will be determined by the speed of your initial data import. This phase can make or break the rest of your project timeline making it essential to start off strong.

Scheduling and staying within the time budgeted for your project will equally affect the efficiency of your whole team. The faster your team can scan and import documents, the faster you can start your document review.

While we can’t control your connection speed, we can manage the resources and technology on our platform to ensure the application performance is optimized for maximum efficiency.

Time equals money; having an eDiscovery tool capable of moving as quickly as you do allows you to work on the next step of your case faster.

Trap 3: Duplicate Data

Nearly 30% of email data is duplicated which directly impacts hosting costs if not removed prior to promotion for review.  Duplicate data occurs when the same file originates from multiple sources and in different formats.

For example, if you have two people engaged in an email exchange and both become custodians in a legal case, both sets of emails are collected for discovery. Now you have the same exchange from both people and you have to determine which set of emails you’re going to use. The complexity of duplicate data increases when the matter is shared across email distribution groups.

By cutting out duplicative documents, you save storage space and reduce the chance that two copies of the same document will be reviewed differently.

To prevent duplicate data from costing time and money, you need an eDiscovery tool to:

  • Centralize your data in one place
  • Eliminate duplicative data
  • Track how data is being reviewed in real-time
  • Prevent conflicting tags by different reviewers

Trap 4: Single User Access to Documents

Remote document review should be an easy and convenient option for you and your staff. However, documents still need to be digitized and uploaded to a shared system. This can be problematic for a number of reasons:

  • You don’t have anyone in the office to upload documents.
  • You don’t have the infrastructure in place to share working documents across multiple users at the same time.
  • You don’t have the ability to review, redact, and produce documents electronically without affecting the originals.

This forces the organization to spend time and money building new infrastructure. Or, they could use a private cloud-hosted system like CloudNine Review.

 

How CloudNine Review Helps You Avoid Inefficiency Traps

CloudNine Review is a safe, robust, and cost-effective solution that simplifies the eDiscovery review process and keeps you more productive.

We offer a single spot repository for all your discovery documents. Whether they are electronic or paper documents, you can load them into CloudNine Review to make them searchable. This allows you to access all the data at the same time giving you a consistent search strategy.

By utilizing a search strategy, you create an efficient way to review your data without wasting time by:

  • Showing search-term history
  • Filtering out previously reviewed documents
  • Setting up preview sets

With incredibly fast upload speeds on our end, installation is simple and straightforward. If there’s a slow connection speed on your end, we can help you identify the source of the problem while offering alternative solutions to upload heavy data loads.

To prevent duplicate data from slowing down your legal document review process, our processing engine detects duplicates and suppresses them before the data gets advanced for review.  Plus, all documents are hashed during the import process, so you can set up automation to identify and review specific documents from the searchable and reviewable records.

Hosted on a private cloud, CloudNine Review is a web-accessible, legal document review platform providing secure access to every approved member of your team. Every document is locked down so nothing can be deleted, altered, or sent to anyone without access. Even metadata like the author and timestamps are protected.

To protect sensitive or confidential data from being exposed, CloudNine Review will redact images of documents. Redacted files are copied and saved as a single-layer file so the redaction bars can’t be removed by outside parties.

 

CloudNine Review is designed to help your eDiscovery services be more efficient and productive.

To avoid the pitfalls of inefficiency traps, click banner below to request a free demo and see how CloudNine Review can help you today.

What Happened in Vegas? It’s No Secret – Read the Buzz

With many reasons to celebrate, CloudNine is still enjoying the excitement of our time Vegas last week. Visiting with valued customers and meeting new contacts are always fortunate opportunities. As an enhancement to those already fruitful conversations, we were thrilled to announce our expanded capabilities through the acquisition of ESI Analyst. Adding modern communication formats such as mobile, chat, social media and more to CloudNine’s powerful and proven applications, fills the market need to manage eDiscovery more effectively, with both modern and traditional data types, on a single platform.

The buzz of our expansion reached the news feeds across multiple social media channels.  A few highlights include:


 

Demonstrations are being scheduled now to debut CloudNine’s new technology – click to request a time to speak and a member of our team will be in touch to schedule.

 

Ready to try it out for yourself?  Request a free demo and see how CloudNine can help you.

Focusing on speed, security, simplicity, and services, CloudNine is dedicated to empowering our law firm and LSP clients with proven eDiscovery software solutions for litigation, investigations, and audits. 

Release Preview LAW 7.6

As data volumes grow, fortunately so has computer processing power.  CloudNine LAW and Explore 7.6 will take advantage of this power boost to amplify your speed to review and production.  The import technology behind both LAW’s Turbo Import and Explore uses a computer’s multiple processing cores more efficiently, making processing faster.

The application updates will include over 200 enhancements to build upon the already strong, import speeds of LAW and Explore.  The most notable improvement in LAW will be the introduction of a Turbo Imaging that can be used in parallel with existing imaging.  Turbo leverages near-native imaging technology to create static images of native files without relying on the native application.  This saves time while imaging, because the files don’t have to be opened, printed to image, and then closed.  The module can also take advantage of multiple processing cores, if available.  With imaging speeds up to eight times faster than the traditional imaging license, Turbo Imaging generates production-ready images quickly and easily.

In Explore, users will benefit from improved reporting capabilities.  This builds on Explore’s email threading, near duplicate detection, advanced filtering and integration with Relativity to provide a first-class, early case assessment experience, allowing clients to reduce the volume of data promoted for review by as much as 70%.  The import and ECA processes are all done without creating additional copies of the data until the client is ready to commit an export of potentially responsive content for further review.  This saves clients from storing copies of data that they don’t need, reducing cost and risk associated with managing multiple identical files.

To learn more about these and other enhancements coming in CloudNine LAW and Explore 7.6, please reach out to your account manager, or email us at info@cloudnine.com to schedule an overview and demonstration.  We’re excited to give you a preview of these updates and plan a wider release in the week of September 13th, 2021.

 

Focusing on speed, security, simplicity, and services, CloudNine is dedicated to empowering our law firm and LSP clients with proven eDiscovery software solutions for litigation, investigations, and audits. 

Ready to try it out for yourself?  Request a free demo and see how CloudNine can help you.

Answer the Unknown Challenges of eDiscovery Review

When it comes to document review in electronic discovery, choosing a solution can be a daunting task. To make an informed decision, you need to know what challenges await you and how to overcome them. 

The three biggest challenges to address when looking for a document review platform are:

  • Security
  • Volume 
  • Cost

By better understanding these challenges and their impact on your operations and bottom line, you’ll be in a better position to choose the best eDiscovery software solution for your business.

Is My eDiscovery Data Safe and Protected?

The benefits of storing eDiscovery data in the cloud are many but, digital security and remote access top the list of concerns among legal teams and legal service providers (LSPs) for these reasons:

  • Lack of control over their data
  • Concerns about handing data over to a third party
  • Worried about their data integrity

Utilizing a company dependent on public cloud solutions like Azure or AWS, means you can’t specifically tell your client where your data actually is as it can be stored across multiple cloud locations.

Another topic, more relevant since the COVID-19 pandemic, is security for remote document review. Creating additional access points can cause worry about your network being vulnerable to data breaches.

Can My eDiscovery Software Handle the Volume and Variety of Records?

Investigations and litigation can create a lot of digital records, often soaring into the terabytes. This is compounded by the variety of digital records being used as evidence in legal proceedings, including:

  • Emails
  • Instant messages
  • Digital images
  • Videos
  • Audio files
  • Text messages
  • Social media posts
  • Websites

This volume and variety of data can have a detrimental impact on your operation if you don’t have the digital space to process or store it all. 

The more documents you have, the more infrastructure you need to support it. This can compromise your software performance which could affect your ability to navigate, search, report, export, or produce required information, in a timely manner.

If that happens, new eDiscovery projects could be delayed or canceled outright while you complete your current project. Delays could also lead to missed deadlines which could cause your clients to be sanctioned or fined by the courts.

Are eDiscovery Tools Cost-Effective?

Simply put, some eDiscovery software can be expensive. Many include a lot of features and functionality you may not even need but, you are charged generously for it. 

When looking for an eDiscovery solution, it is important to take the following into consideration in order to get the most cost-effective solution:

  • Is the pricing flexible, allowing you to pay only for what you need?
  • How much archived data is stored on the cloud vs. on-prem? Often a hybrid solution will provide you with the most cost savings. 
  • What support is included within your contract? In order to reap the most cost-saving benefits, it’s important to have your team well-versed in the eDiscovery tool.

The eDiscovery Solution – CloudNine Review

Secure, powerful, and cost-effective, CloudNine Review simplifies eDiscovery enabling you to upload documents quickly and to begin reviewing data within minutes. 

CloudNine Review utilizes a private cloud environment so you know where your data is at all times, giving you better audit controls and the assurance your data is intact. To protect client data, CloudNine cybersecurity safeguards are always up-to-date and constantly monitored.

Another safeguard to protect your data on the CloudNine platform are access controls allowing only authorized staff to review specific documents:

  • User-based permissions
  • Project-based rights
  • Document-level rights

By utilizing our private cloud platform, you have access to all of your data anywhere, anytime, without having to log into your network VPN. 

Also, CloudNine Review carries greater bandwidth so you’re able to get your data much faster. As an example, the first day for a new project can look like this:

  • Registered online and began uploading data
  • Uploaded 27 GB of PST email files
  • Processed 300,000 documents (emails and attachments)
  • A reduced document set by 61% with deduplication and irrelevant domain filtering

Imagine being able to accomplish all of that in just the first 24 hours.

The best part is you get what you pay for. CloudNine’s transparent pricing model includes multiple pricing methodologies so you’re never caught off-guard.

Beginning with a predictable upfront cost and low storage fees, CloudNine pricing models are designed to keep your costs down while providing the essential services you need.  To learn about our flexible pricing options, click here to speak to one of our eDiscovery experts.

  • All-in Model – one ‘all-in’ price with no hourly rates for self-service
  • Flex Model – low monthly storage costs for long-running litigation

Plus, you only pay for what you use if your case ends or becomes dormant. Older, dormant case data can be archived and saved at your own location using CloudNine Concordance to help you keep costs low and your data safely archived for the future.

Focusing on speed, security, simplicity, and services, CloudNine is dedicated to empowering our law firm and LSP clients with proven eDiscovery software solutions for litigation, investigations, and audits.

Ready to try it out for yourself? Request a free demo and see how CloudNine can help you.

Export Review Documents Using Self-Serve Productions

#DidYouKnow: You can export your own documents for production from CloudNine Review, with or without support from the CloudNine Client Services team?

 

Document production sizes can range from one document to tens or even hundreds of thousands of documents.

Some platforms require legal teams to work with their project managers to coordinate productions, regardless of size or complexity. This can lead to delays and risk as instructions are handed off to teams, unfamiliar with the case.

 

Self-service productions provide complete project control with 24×7 access to export case documents independently.

  • Control your data to ensure important, relevant documents are not missed.
  • Control your project cost by paying only for what you need and, nothing you don’t.

CloudNine Review empowers clients to export documents themselves, including native files and emails, searchable text, and static images of documents containing confidential language, unique identifiers, and redactions.

Ready to Get Started with Self-Service Productions?  

To start a self-service production in CloudNine Review, select the Tools menu in the upper right corner then, click the Self-Service Production option.

Next, select whether you would like to produce images, native files, text, and metadata, or any combination of these.

If your documents do not yet have static images, they can be created during this process.  Annotations and redactions can be permanently applied to images, and there are several Excel imaging options, including using slip sheets instead of generating images.

The fielded metadata associated with the production records can be exported in a variety of formats including the common .DAT file, a .CSV file, or XML.

Users running a production can select and deselect fields to include in the production metadata file.

View Productions As They Progress in the User-facing Dashboard:   

This screen also allows users to clean up old productions and exports they no longer need to access.

Stay informed of software updates and browse training documentation in the CloudNine Review Knowledgebase (login required).

To learn more about CloudNine Review and Self-Service Productions, click the button below to schedule a demo!

Here’s a Terrific Listing of eDiscovery Workstream Processes and Tasks: eDiscovery Best Practices

Let’s face it – workflows and workstreams in eDiscovery are as varied as organizations that conduct eDiscovery itself.  Every organization seems to do it a little bit differently, with a different combination of tasks, methodologies and software solutions than anyone else.  But, could a lot of organizations improve their eDiscovery workstreams?  Sure.  Here’s a resource (that you probably already know well) which could help them do just that.

Rob Robinson’s post yesterday on his terrific Complex Discovery site is titled The Workstream of eDiscovery: Considering Processes and Tasks and it provides a very comprehensive list of tasks for eDiscovery processes throughout the life cycle.  As Rob notes:

“From the trigger point for audits, investigations, and litigation to the conclusion of cases and matters with the defensible disposition of data, there are countless ways data discovery and legal discovery professionals approach and administer the discipline of eDiscovery.  Based on an aggregation of research from leading eDiscovery educators, developers, and providers, the following eDiscovery Processes and Tasks listing may be helpful as a planning tool for guiding business and technology discussions and decisions related to the conduct of eDiscovery projects. The processes and tasks highlighted in this listing are not all-inclusive and represent only one of the myriads of approaches to eDiscovery.”

Duly noted.  Nonetheless, the list of processes and tasks is comprehensive.  Here are the number of tasks for each process:

  • Initiation (8 tasks)
  • Legal Hold (11 tasks)
  • Collection (8 tasks)
  • Ingestion (17 tasks)
  • Processing (6 tasks)
  • Analytics (11 tasks)
  • Predictive Coding (6 tasks)*
  • Review (17 tasks)
  • Production/Export (6 tasks)
  • Data Disposition (6 tasks)

That’s 96 total tasks!  But, that’s not all.  There are separate lists of tasks for each method of predictive coding, as well.  Some of the tasks are common to all methods, while others are unique to each method:

  • TAR 1.0 – Simple Active Learning (12 tasks)
  • TAR 1.0 – Simple Passive Learning (9 tasks)
  • TAR 2.0 – Continuous Active Learning (7 tasks)
  • TAR 3.0 – Cluster-Centric CAL (8 tasks)

The complete list of processes and tasks can be found here.  While every organization has a different approach to eDiscovery, many have room for improvement, especially when it comes to exercising due diligence during each process.  Rob provides a comprehensive list of tasks within eDiscovery processes that could help organizations identify steps they could be missing in their processes.

So, what do you think?  How many steps do you have in your eDiscovery processes?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Sponsor: This blog is sponsored by CloudNine, which is a data and legal discovery technology company with proven expertise in simplifying and automating the discovery of data for audits, investigations, and litigation. Used by legal and business customers worldwide including more than 50 of the top 250 Am Law firms and many of the world’s leading corporations, CloudNine’s eDiscovery automation software and services help customers gain insight and intelligence on electronic data.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.