The dramatic increase in electronic communications and operational and transactional databases, combined with rapid advances in e-discovery capabilities, have reshaped highly document-intensive litigation and regulatory or internal investigations.  Collaboration technologies — including online repositories, data/deal rooms and workspaces — provide a means of vastly streamlining the information-sharing and collaboration processes and requirements at the core of modern complex litigation.  But, not everything that glitters is gold.  The technology must rise above potential pitfalls:  review of the wrong data; insufficient culling of the data; lack of assignment tracking for crucial tasks; and avoiding information "analysis paralysis."  It must make a positive impact (i.e., substantial financial and human resource savings) on the firm's bottom-line.

The Winning Strategy
Before selecting a collaboration tool and beginning a document-intensive case, project leadership must provide the strategy, which starts with a vision of what the teams are looking for and considering how much information to collect.  In order to find the proverbial "needle in a haystack," you need to ensure the collection strategy is sound to guarantee you are searching in the right haystack. The strategy must determine how much data is too much.

How the material will be reviewed is part two of the strategy.  Many electronic discovery and document review experts have stated that the majority of cost lies in human review.  Putting too much data into the human reviewer's hands is a guaranteed way to increase the cost.  The best technology can cull the information down to the relevant documents, and thus reduce the workload for the collaboration project.

Avoiding analysis paralysis and reviewer burnout are additional benefits. The manual search-and-retrieval process causes retention issues at law firms.  No lawyer wants to be locked in a room 10 hours a day for 20 days manually sifting through documents.  Quality of work may be compromised due to such a tedious search process.

That process can also be time-consuming and costly. Imagine the legal fees associated with having 100 lawyers working 10 hours a day to sort a million documents looking for relevant data.

Collaboration technology will reduce costs, speed review and save sanity.  By utilizing sophisticated analytic tools, reviewers develop a high level of understanding of the documents being searched, and their database design allows lawyers to view the whole landscape of data. Analytic toolsets enable law firms to produce a high level of understanding of the data at hand while simultaneously cutting the retrieval process time by almost two-thirds, thus saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential legal fees.

Tools that enable processes for collaboration teams also increase effectiveness, further reducing time and project costs.  For many firms, having a centralized, Web-based repository that enables access anywhere in the world, 24/7, has become table stakes during document reviews.  Other "basics" include role-based document security access, especially for multi-party situations and the ability to redact, tag and search documents.  Also, as projects become larger, integration of workflow into the technology becomes more important.  The means to create assignments and to manage and measure team member effectiveness has become a necessity for large-scale reviews.

When considering investment in electronic discovery tools and approaches, every decision affects the cost of a document review project.  A collaboration technology must help achieve the broader goals and answer to the pressures to produce time and cost savings.  To meet high standards for effectiveness, the best technology must be deployed with expert guidance and deep knowledge.  As leading law firms have discovered, having collaboration tools in your court provides a valuable partner to back up even the most difficult e-discovery situation.

About our author . . .

Mike Raley is a manager at FTI Consulting, Inc., responsible for technology marketing.  He has seven years of experience in the technology and consulting industries.  Mike spent the first five years of his career at Sapient, a leading business innovator, where he managed marketing programs and a globally distributed team.  Mike can be reached at Michael.Raley@FTIConsulting.com.