LAWTECH GURU BLOG by Jeff Beard

Bring eDiscovery In-house While Avoiding Pitfalls

InsideCounsel offers some tips for those interested in bringing eDiscovery in-house while avoiding pitfalls, including some comments from yours truly. Check out "Inside Job" in InsideCounsel's November issue, published in the monthly Technology section.

It's truly a challenging time for companies, but it's doable with the appropriate vision and approach.  Many GC's and AGC's are under significant pressure to reduce their litigation and eDiscovery spend.  Along with other approaches, more and more this usually includes looking inward to insource and automate repeatable and defensible processes as well as gaining greater control over their information management.  Increases in efficiency and effectiveness in identifying, preserving, and culling down the data in-house in earlier stages should translate to lower review and hosting costs, and hopefully shorter review cycles related to the decrease in volume.

However, it's not just about bringing in technological solutions.  I see technology as enabling processes and improving efficiency when done right.  But before that can happen, companies need to discern the impact that various policy and technical choices will have on their ability to manage, identify, and cost-effectively work with their corporate data in eDiscovery, investigative, and compliance contexts.  There's also the question of scale, as many small to mid-sized companies may not have either the volume or types of litigation or perhaps the internal human capital to justify some of these investments.  For larger companies, the concerns typically fall at the other end of the spectrum, such as will their insourced solutions scale appropriately and cover the desired data types through all the hand-off points?  Thus I think it's safe to say that for most companies, insourcing will be a multi-year effort, with iterative cycles of designing effective and defensible workflows to connect all the dots.