Historical Essays

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: . Published: 2011-12-21 15:04:33  The team at the eDiscoveryJournal is excited to announce the winners for our annual eDiscoveryJournal holiday drawing a $250 gift card. We had many entries, but only a few can win.Here is our list of the 2011 winners: Jonathan O. Steen – Redding, Steen, & Staton Juli Sauer – Best Buy David Meadows – Kroll Ontrack [...]

One key element for transforming your eDiscovery from an ad hoc reactive fire drill into a mature, proactive business process is the development and implementation of formal Quality Assurance(QA) and Quality Control(QC). I have always viewed QA as tackling ongoing process improvement such as regular cross case comparisons, while QC tends to be checking on did the process perform properly. Basically, how can we make the process better versus did everything work right? When interviewing corporate client eDiscovery teams, everyone is conscious of the need for QA/QC, but the vast majority seem to feel that it is impractical or unrealistic given their tight deadlines, lack of resources and typical fire-fighter mentality. Some law firm clients have swung to the opposite extreme, with elaborate workflow, check lists, physical chain of custody forms and more. Their QC has grown out of reasonable proportion and their productivity suffers because their overall QA has been neglected. So how do we achieve a reasonable quality process without bringing the legal process to a halt?

Yesterday, EPIQ Systems announced its acquisition of De Novo Legal for $68 million. It’s a 2011 transaction, but look for it to be indicative of something to expect in 2012 – service providers getting bigger and broader geographic coverage via acquisition. While huge acquisitions on par with HP’s purchase of Autonomy or Symantec’s purchase of Clearwell are certainly a possibility, the real action is more likely to be in the service provider business.

The impact of discovery in this era of electronic information explosion has greatly affected corporations that are full-time litigants. These effects go all the way to the core of their businesses in terms of cost, risk, and management of information. The resulting position for organizations has become reactive, and discovery costs have spiraled out of control. Over the last several years there has been a good deal of discussion on the value of bringing eDiscovery processes in-house – often referred to as “litigation readiness.” The goal of developing an in-house eDiscovery program is to manage it as a business process, thus gaining efficiency and cost control.

The vast majority of our corporate clients are public corporations with inside counsel. Generally we work directly under inside counsel’s supervision to protect our work product. A fast assessment engagement for a smaller corporation without any inside counsel got me thinking about eDiscovery risk vs. cost decisions in a different light. Civil litigation is a ‘sooner or later’ fact of life for any public corporation with enough revenue to tempt a plaintiff. As eDiscovery becomes a defacto business process, what hat is the typical inside counsel wearing when they make decisions on matter scope, filters, data sources and more? We tend to think of counsel as the final arbitrators of eDiscovery decisions. But frequently, inside counsel is wearing the business hat when applying the ‘reasonable effort’ standard to situations. In a company without inside counsel, who does that final decision fall to?

The entire eDiscoveryJournal / eDJ Group team will all be in attendance at LTNY this year. Our schedules are getting pretty booked up, but we will make every attempt to coordinate time for business meetings, panels and analyst debriefings. If you haven’t had a chance to schedule a time with someone from our team or if you would like someone from the team to speak on a panel, please email us to get something on the calendar.