Please enjoy this blog post which is posted on behalf of an anonymous ILTA member.
The trend is on the rise to bring eDiscovery inside of Corporations. The primary reason affecting this movement is centered around the fact that ‘legal teams want things done cheaper and faster’. Vendors and law firms charge premium prices for storage and solutions. Corporations are getting smarter and looking at dedicated technologies to effectively control costs: the total spend on legal and rethinking external spend. There is no longer a need to maintain an expansive IT staff or a large infrastructure footprint within corporate data centers. Corporations are leveraging cloud-based solutions to control external eDiscovery costs. RelativityOne is becoming more attractive for corporate clients. With this solution, they can host their data without having a vendor charging an uplift on storage prices.
Another reason to bring eDiscovery in-house is to protect the company and reduce risk. There have been recent data breaches with eDiscovery vendors that have put corporate clients at risk. In years past, vendors would handle most of the eDiscovery model (EDRM). Vendors would collect, process, and review the data. This caused a lot of privacy concerns for corporate clients. For example, sending a custodian’s entire mailbox that may contain trade secrets/intellectual property is never advisable. Having solutions in-house allow corporate clients to use analytics. Key word terms, anonymization, pseudo-anonymization are among the few methodologies that can be utilized to cull and promote the least amount of data as possible to guard against invasions of privacy while still maintaining a high level of confidence in the results is for companies to proactively manage their data.
A third reason is knowledge. Employer’s/IT staff know their data the best. Many IT employees have been working with their business for years and know their systems inside and out. With new technologies, this is very feasible for corporate IT groups to meet expectations. For example, many corporations are moving to cloud solutions like O365. With O365 you can do collections easily with Security and Compliance Center.
Solutions outside of eDiscovery can benefit from in-house solutions. For example, corporations are utilizing eDiscovery solutions for compliance issues. They can easily collect, process, and put data in review for compliance officers to review. It is much easier than the compliance team reviewing emails one by one.
To make an inhouse solution work, IT and Legal need to plan together. A true partnership is required to make things work. If you aren’t doing eDiscovery in-house, give it a try. Start small with employment matters and move on from there.
#CorporateLegalOperations
#LitigationSupportoreDiscovery
#Firm