I spotted my friend Tony LaMacchia’s picture in my morning media feeds and made a note to circle back to read the interview by Jeff Kruse and Cash Butler. Normally I would just pull a couple good excerpts in an eDJ News commentary. I had such a hard time remembering which of many feeds I had seen Tony’s smiling face in that it took me almost an hour to run down the interview. So you will get two blogs in one. First comes a couple highlights from the work Tony and the Freeport legal team have done.
“Tony knows value. As proof, he and his team at Freeport were recently nominated and among the finalists for an Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) Value Champion Award for litigation cost savings through technology for generating a 2.9M return on investment (ROI) in 18 months.”
Now that is a stellar ROI for a tech investment. As much as I pushed corporate owned eDiscovery platforms in the bad old days, calculating their ROI was always tricky when we had to factor in servers, SQL licenses and IT administration costs. Mature SaaS cloud platforms like Relativity One, Exterro, Reveal and others now enable corporate legal teams to manage their own matters without the cost and hassle of implementation and system maintenance. They also require a more sophisticated legal team who can monitor these evolving platforms and managed service providers in Tony’s ‘Trust, but verify’ model of management.
“One of Tony’s successes has revolved around efforts to track and measure metrics to help Freeport ‘define and refine value’ in legal services. In addition to the annual vendor vetting process, Freeport also conducts an annual audit to ‘look at the processes and numbers to see how it can improve.’”
A mature eDiscovery program is not a one and done process. It has to continually measure and re-evaluate KPI’s to keep improving. I recommend that clients conduct these kinds of annual fire drills and keep annual benchmarks to understand how their costs, matter metrics and custodial data sources are evolving. Enjoy the interview and the take-aways on what a mature corporate eDiscovery program can accomplish.
Now for part two on why finding this article took me almost an hour. Over the decades, I have developed many saved searches, RSS feeds, a Google Custom Search Engine and a list of social media feeds that I review most mornings to flag items for follow up. Until recently managed this ‘research list’ in a huge word doc. Inefficient, but remember that Barry Murphy made me start this habit back in 2007, so don’t judge. As part of recent research on M365, I am making myself ‘use all the M365 tools to understand them better’. Using tools like Microsoft Lists, Power Automate to move/label and creating custom external data sources in Microsoft Search & Intelligence has given me a much higher appreciation for Microsoft’s infrastructure and just HOW HARD it can be for knowledge workers to leverage. There has to be a better way.
Although I created a task to ‘Read Tony’s interview’ this morning on my phone, I neglected to copy the URL or note which feed I had seen it in. After all, a ‘LaMacchia AND Freeport AND eDiscovery’ search would surely bring it up. After getting tired of scrolling Google results, I jumped into my giant ‘Press’ folder with a ‘LaMacchia’ search over the 29k emails, RSS posts and saved search alerts. Nada. My Google Custom Search Engine had not yet picked it up (more scrolling). It was not in my Twitter feed. Twitter search is a joke. No luck in my various FBook Groups either. More scrolling. Ah! It had to be LinkedIn. Not in my Notifications or in recent Posts. When did LinkedIn become FBook for Bizness? Anyway, a LaMacchia search finally brought up Cash’s post when I remembered to use the right filter. Now I hate reading embedded articles in the LinkedIn panels, especially paginated PDF’s without underlying text. So more searching was required to find the original Legal Business World eMagazine. Whew. The interview is great, but what a waste of time. As I said, there has to be a better way. Thank you all for indulging in my process rant. If I cannot find a better solution I will just have to make one. Stay tuned.
Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Contact him directly for a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.
Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer a journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being posted. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations.
See Greg’s latest pic on Instagram.