Times of crisis have the potential to shine light on gaping holes in even the most stable of eDiscovery systems. Throw in a mix of limited budgets, expanding data sources, and increasingly complex investigations/litigation and suddenly your “do more with less” case team is fighting an uphill battle doing a lot more, with a lot less.
In our view, however, the crisis has only pointed to the elephant we’ve known for some time: eDiscovery is inherently expensive and complicated.
Taking Back the Reins
Companies across industries have historically relied on service partners to tackle messy processes. And for good reason: Partners make the eDiscovery job look easy! They wrap services, technical capabilities, and best practices into tailored workflows. Still, with third party costs accounting for 45% of litigation spend, many companies have taken the leap in the last few years in bringing some of this work “in-house.”
In 2018, a study of Effective Legal Spend Management found 48% of respondents expected in-house legal budgets to grow. More than half of in-house legal departments are building their own onsite eDiscovery capabilities; a trend that shows no signs of stopping. Without the guiding hand of partners, Corporations are suddenly left to their own devices in creating unified, compliant processes.
With an estimated 68% of total eDiscovery spend going to in-person, time-intensive collection processes, we see remote, integrated end-point collection platforms such as Optimum Navigator™ becoming the new standard. Times of change perhaps provide the nudge legal departments need to evaluate just how effective these resources are orchestrated.
A New Case Team
How can legal teams realistically focus on outcomes, risk management, and case strategy when platform know-how is limited to specialists? Enter automation: It’s time to look for platforms that integrate multiple technologies, people, and resources to help small teams tackle big eDiscovery challenges.
A platform’s time to value needs to meet the quickly increasing demands for smaller, nimbler case teams. While on one front outsourcing budgets are under pressure, we are all witnessing a shift to a new kind of internal case teams: “Legal Operations.”
So what does this really mean…
Intelligent automation can drastically change the way a corporation runs eDiscovery, allowing Legal Ops to build repeatable processes and take control. Intelligent Automation from platforms like Optimum deliver the following:
Optimum’s unified platform transforms legal operations: The cost, time, and effort shifts from specialist-led “projects” to simplified, streamlined internal processes, where forensic capabilities and case-based reporting are available to the average user.
Anil Kona, CEO of Vertical Discovery and Intelligent automation expert speaks to a shift that is very much under way:
“The continued adoption of cloud computing has made traditional digital forensics obsolete. Requiring physical possession of equipment isn’t necessary anymore, as remote and cloud-based services are the norm for in-place search, preservation and collections in a forensically sound manner. Along with robotic process automation, the road has been paved for end-to-end intelligent automation for corporations to simplify and manage these programs.”