The Role of eDiscovery Consulting Firms in Streamlining Legal Processes

The amount of information that accompanies legal cases can be overwhelming. Streamlining data is critical to reducing costs and risks and allowing the legal team to work more efficiently.

However, eDiscovery is a highly complicated process that involves many steps. Here are some of the most important ones: identification, preservation, review, and analysis.

Preparation

With 2.5 exabytes of new data created daily, legal professionals must be prepared to handle information at exponentially increasing rates and volumes. eDiscovery consulting firms can help clients manage this information with robust eDiscovery and investigation processes, tools, and support.

Managing this information also involves complying with various legal obligations, including attorney-client and work product privilege, confidentiality, and preservation. These obligations should be handled transparently with clear communication, training, and standardized practices.

This means moving away from an outdated model where individual attorneys handle discovery for each matter to a more centralized, streamlined, and sophisticated process that leverages best practices and tools like tagging. Tags allow legal teams to search and organize ESI by responsiveness, privilege, or issue. This speeds up review, cuts costs, and reduces the chance of missing key evidence. In addition, it helps mitigate risk by reducing the amount of potentially sensitive information shared with opposing parties.

Collection

Identifying sources of potentially relevant electronically stored information (ESI) and preserving it in its original form, whether that’s email, instant messaging chats, documents, accounting databases, CAD/CAM files, websites, or data from smart appliances, onboard computers in vehicles, or the internet of things. Preserving ESI and its metadata prevents “spoliation” – the intentional or unintentional destruction of discoverable evidence – that could result in court sanctions.

It uses computer-assisted review and predictive coding software to prioritize and organize data for legal review by attorneys. This reduces the amount of ESI that legal teams must review and makes it easier to spot essential information critical to litigation success.

The final step in processing ESI is preparing it for production by converting digital assets into physical documentation for use in court. Using advanced legal document production software to identify and reorganize relevant information for court presentations can significantly cut review hours.

Processing

Streamlining legal workflows involves using technology-driven tools to automate certain aspects of a firm’s operations. The goal is to cut costs and improve efficiency, resulting in tremendous success for attorneys and clients.

The eDiscovery field is one of the fastest-growing in the legal industry. It is a promising career option for recent law graduates seeking a change from traditional lawyering roles.

In the past, attorneys would manually review electronic documents by reviewing each file one at a time in individual programs. This method could have been more efficient and risked spoliation.

Today, eDiscovery processing services help lawyers and clients review data more efficiently by organizing it into manageable, easy-to-visualize datasets. This reduces case delays, ensures compliance with regulatory requirements, and positions lawyers to succeed in court. It also enhances the security of a client’s information by making it difficult for unauthorized parties to access or alter data.

Review

eDiscovery solutions offer legal professionals a structured way to handle electronic data, ensuring that substantial evidence is noticed. With powerful search and analysis capabilities, these tools enable attorneys to identify relevant documents, keywords, and patterns quickly and effectively. They also allow attorneys to collaborate seamlessly across teams, fostering efficiency and consistency in document review.

eDiscovery services are critical to the legal enablement process, helping lawyers prepare their cases and position them for success in court. Those who work in this field are responsible for managing end-to-end processes, providing the back-end work that allows lawyers to focus on preparing their arguments. This is an excellent career option for those with law degrees looking for a change from the traditional law firm environment.

Analysis

Streamlining legal processes enhances productivity and improves quality standards. It also eliminates human error and enables data to be processed more precisely. This allows firms to complete projects in shorter timelines, deliver results at a lower cost, and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.

Traditional legal discovery involves teams of paralegals and lawyers sifting through volumes of paper documents, which can be costly, inefficient, and prone to errors. eDiscovery solutions utilize technology to streamline this process, providing incredible speed and accuracy.

For example, eDiscovery software enables users to review files individually rather than using manual methods that can alter metadata and lead to destruction. This saves time and money and positions attorneys for success in court. It also helps trim datasets to avoid unnecessary information and prevent omissions that can impact a case’s outcome or result in sanctions. It also provides analytics and reporting services to help attorneys build more robust client cases.

Production

When legal disputes involving electronically stored information arise, the parties must engage in discovery. In years past, this was a manual process, requiring the exchange of paper documents—often hundreds and sometimes thousands of pages. This was time-consuming and prone to human error, making it easy to overlook crucial evidence.

Today, eDiscovery vendors offer various services to assist legal teams with collecting, processing, reviewing, and producing electronic data. Using advanced technology, these services enable legal professionals to efficiently identify relevant documents and analyze the content of those documents to produce legally admissible evidence.

Streamlining legal operations through a dedicated team structure can lead to faster turnarounds and better quality control. The streamlined workflow allows individuals to work seamlessly together towards common goals, reducing errors and miscommunications. This, in turn, enables firms to meet deadlines and regulatory compliance standards more effectively. A leading law firm, for example, reduced contract review turnaround times by 50% using a dedicated team structure.