Measuring Your In-House eDiscovery Maturity

I love surveys. Even surveys from Providers that I know are going to be skewed by their customer base. In this case, the 220 respondents (I had to ask Exterro for that number) on their in-house benchmarking survey skewed towards mid-tier to global corporations without a formal eDiscovery team. Wow. Only 4% of respondents said that they had a dedicated eDiscovery project manager running eDiscovery activities. That does not represent my client base or the overall corporate legal departments that I was surveying back 2008-2018. That does not mean that the survey and conclusions are without value, just acknowledge the skew before reading. The eDiscovery metrics tracking responses feel right. When I get brought in to support an eDiscovery maturity (aka reduce cost) initiative, my clients rarely have these numbers or metrics like average custodial data, percent culling and percentage of frequent flyer custodians. I loved seeing 11% of respondents saying that they do 100% of legal services internally. Makes me wonder that only 4% had a Litsupport manager. I guess their inside counsel are way more educated on eDiscovery than most I coach.