Jones Walker officially began a Managed Services partnership
with Iris Data Services in January of 2013.
Since that time we have experienced great success with the partnership
and have freely shared our story with fellow ILTA members. Last year I co-authored a white paper article
with Scott Berger of Iris Data Services ("Fitting an eDiscovery Solutionto Meet the Needs of a Workflow: Outsourced/Managed Services") describing our journey in choosing Managed
Services as our solution. Now in the 3rd
year of our contract, I offer the following points in response to the several
questions I have been asked by fellow ILTA members. Invariably, one specific question emerges in
every conversation: "Would you do it again?"
While there are many things to consider when evaluating the
possibility of establishing a managed services partnership, the most important
is obviously the selection of a reputable service provider. I offer several key items for your
consideration below. Keep in mind this
isn't a quiz from Cosmopolitan, so your answers may not automatically match you
up to a specific vendor. But these
questions can help guide you through the many conversations you will have with
potential service providers.
1. Will you have a dedicated team
supporting you?
Whether it is a dedicated team or a
support pool, make sure you understand the level of support that will be
provided as part of the managed services partnership. Ask for an organizational chart for your
support team so you know the players, their roles in supporting you, and where
the escalation points are in the event that you need to escalate an issue up
the chain.
2. Does your Service Level Agreement
("SLA") address response time as well as follow-up
from the initial response?
A standard SLA will address the
initial response time (e.g. "We have received your
email/request…."). But you will
want to request that it also addresses the timeframe for any subsequent updates
(e.g. "We are still working on your request and will report back in 1
hour."). This will likely take some
negotiations so that the service provider can ensure that the requested
follow-up does not interfere with their internal workflow and support
efforts. Requesting this additional
communication provides you with the necessary information to proactively update
your internal project teams.
3. Do you receive an allotment of project
management hours as part of your managed services
partnership?
If you are allotted PM hours, follow
this simple step….USE THEM!!!! If you do
not use PM hours offered as part of your partnership, you are throwing money
out of the window each and every month.
These hours can be used for archiving data, creating custom database
scripts, etc.
4. Will you be processing all data
in-house, will the manages services partner process all of your data, or will
you have a
hybrid approach?
This should be addressed when
determining your business needs. There
are so many variables that go into choosing a processing workflow and these can
dovetail with your managed services partnership. Options include processing behind your
firewall using your own third-party software (LAW, Nuix, etc.) and transferring
only the data that is to be loaded to the service provider, processing within
the managed services environment using the features of your review software (if
available), or having your managed services partner process using their
enterprise level processing tools. Map your workflow and discuss the details
with potential managed services partners so you ensure that your workflow is as
efficient and economically sound as possible.
5. What level of involvement will you and
your team have in the administration of the review platform?
Will you manage each workspace
(loading, exporting, producing, troubleshooting) or will the managed services
partner handle this for you similar to a standard per-project engagement? Will you have rights to create/manage user
accounts across your platform or will you need to request these services from
the provider to the detriment of your monthly PM hours? Some managed services partners allow you to
fully manage your review platform, while some limit the administrative
functions you can perform. Again, this
goes back to addressing your business needs.
6. What level of access will you have
across the infrastructure of your managed services environment?
Will you have full administrative
rights to all the servers in your environment?
If deploying a review platform with a SQL backend, will you be able to
log into the SQL server and run queries?
The level of rights granted will depend on the managed services partner,
but there are very few who currently allow this level of access. We chose to have full access for complete
transparency. However, we share this
access with Iris Data Services so they are able to keep the servers patched and
updated for operations, security, and usability reasons.
7. Which tools/services are available
through your partnership?
Again, this directly correlates to
the tasks you will handle internally vs. the tasks you will expect your managed
services partner to handle for you (addressed at the onset when determining
your business needs). For instance, if
you do not provide collection services in-house, does your managed services
partner provide this service? What if
you receive MAC files, Lotus Notes NSF files, etc. -- do you have the necessary
tools in-house to process these files?
If you cannot process these in-house, it would be helpful to review
historical data and metrics to determine how often you have received these
types of files in the past. Does it make
sense to procure the software or would it make more sense to have your managed
services partner process these types of files for you? Although we typically receive NSF files for
multiple cases each year, we know that there are nuances with NSF files that
are specific to the setup of each client and Domino server. For this reason, we
have decided to leave this type of processing to the experts, so Iris processes
these for us.
8. Will you bill hosting costs to the
client?
There is no easy answer to this
question. Advice, feedback and buy-in
will be required from the head of your litigation department, CFO/COO, CIO, and
other senior management in order to determine if a fee structure will work for
your firm.
As you can see, there are numerous factors to consider. The most important part of the entire process
is having a clear definition of your business needs. Once you have your business needs established,
the rest seems to fall into place. So to
answer the question, Yes, we most certainly would do it all over again! Our partnership has been very successful and
we are planning to offer more services sooner than we anticipated because of
this success.