Follow on Google News News By Tag Industry News News By Location Country(s) Industry News
Follow on Google News | The Evolution Toward a Utility Model for eDiscovery ServicesDigital Reef's CTO and Founder, Steve Akers, shares his knowledge on the evolution of eDiscovery and the move towards a utility model for eDiscovery Services.
By: Digital Reef Evolutionary Process Anyone who has walked into a legal discovery processing “shop” is usually greeted by a bunch of PC’s on racks with a number of human operators walking from one to another. Data is usually copied in batches and logs are kept as to who has what on certain machines. Bigger “outfits” are more automated and sophisticated, but the analogy is that long ago someone built the racks of equipment and invested their hard work into relationships and the building of processes that lead to good discovery outcomes. In some respects these companies built a “forge” in a central place and then began using it on a job by job basis, much like the medieval blacksmith did when he set up shop and started building swords and making armor. This capacity had a finite limit and was valuable, but it did run into the bounds of time and space and could only produce so many swords or suits of armor in a given time. The services were valuable however and indispensable; For legal discovery; the businesses that began years ago grew up over time and built a series of processes that rely on staid and stationary technology provisioned in one central place and used over and over again. The expertise in collecting data and managing projects and performing legal processing likely grew together with this technology and infrastructure as a package offered to customers as a total service. For large litigation this is still the way that a lot of Ediscovery is done. As litigation grew this process became recognized as a large expense and the cost of this service began making customers question the method of strictly using outside vendors for Ediscovery. Alternatives to the legal service provider approach were explored as a result. The prediction of the extinction of the legal service provider processing shop (the blacksmith) also has not and probably will never come true. There are many reasons why; chief among them is that legal discovery is not “just search” and is in fact a “market basket” of skills and abilities along with very specific large-scale data processing. A company wishing to achieve a legal discovery capability has to start with building infrastructure but there is more to it than hardware and software acquisitions alone. There was a lot of talk about bringing this Ediscovery process “in-house” Corporate IT managers found out a few things along the way with implementing the legal discovery process in house: 1.The capital equipment and the software license expenses to run this kind of software are huge if not extensively prohibitive. 2.The training costs for staff that run and maintain these systems are large and never-ending. 3.The storage requirements alone for the indexes and the legal hold locations can take months to provision and involve huge operating expenses and above all management overhead to keep running. 4.The servers that are required for a corporate installation of electronic discovery technology can be very extensive; one installation I know of (at a major US corporate headquarters) 5.The sporadic nature of the average large Ediscovery project also makes the provisioning of systems and storage for this purpose alone hard to justify. Months may go by after an initial deployment and use of the technology. Very little activity can then occur for months while the case involving an electronic discovery matter progresses through the courts and litigation process. Equipment provisioned for an initial data assessment can sit idle for months while the results of the analysis are debated by the legal teams. Aside from these more or less “hard physical” realities, the cost of proper forensic collection and the project management around electronic discovery projects were not avoidable by bringing technology in-house. I would even anecdotally argue that in some cases it caused corporate counsel and managers to spend more than they had previously on these consulting services. A capacity services model began making sense to users as they tried to employ their own electronic discovery service to “save expense dollars”. Some legal service providers were advocating that they could set up and operate equipment and software internal to corporate operations as a service to save money. These have had some success, but largely have run into the same issues that the corporation itself experienced. Provisioning individual instances of electronic discovery capacity behind corporate firewalls is expensive and hard to justify as an ongoing business process. A flexible capacity services model make far more sense for this type of application. Like the blacksmith, a knight could have conceivably purchased a forge and attempted to make his own armor, but it would probably have been a better use of his time to practice for battle (his core competency) in case the castle was to come under attack. Letting the blacksmith make the armor and the knight put it on and use it was probably the best use of everyone’s time in the Middle Ages. Having the legal service provider collect and process data and provide electronic discovery services while the corporation builds its product or provides its service is likely to also be the best division of labor in this context. It seems like corporate counsel and IT staff and legal service providers themselves are coming to this realization. The pendulum is swinging back to where corporate and even service providers are realizing that the in-house model seemed like a good idea at the time but that legal service providers are still a necessary part of the legal discovery “ecosystem” To read and learn more visit http://www.digitalreefinc.com. # # # Digital Reef is a leading e-discovery software provider helping enterprises, law firms, and litigation support service providers with their largest and most complex eDiscovery matters. End
Account Email Address Account Phone Number Disclaimer Report Abuse
|
|