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Many lawyers spend a large portion of their time on administrative tasks like tracking the status of various cases, bridging information gaps, looking for information, securing facts, following up, document reviewing prior to eDiscovery, and building structures to be able to handle different matters and (sensitive) information more easily. Most of these tasks are done in collaboration with others and require the right set of legal tech tools.
This article is the second part of a trilogy focusing on how technology can help with document review prior to eDiscovery processes, more effective virtual collaboration, and safeguarding sensitive information.
In Part 1 of this blog series we focused on finding, retaining, and acting on Information. In this article, we will give a view on how Early Data Assessment could help with more effective use of your resources and review budgets.
How EDA Reduces Document Review and eDiscovery Costs
The total volume of data created is growing exponentially. A couple of years back, Symantec studied 5,000 lawyers in ten countries and found that every single lawyer questioned confirmed that they struggled to cope with up to 50% more electronically stored information (ESI) per case than just five years ago. Thinking of this, we could argue that the need to rapidly narrow down a dataset will become increasingly important with time.
One cost element that in-house legal teams have to manage is the amount of data that needs to be reviewed by an external law firm in virtual data rooms and discovery review tools like Relativity, where the cost is often related to the size of the data set.
Imagine a case that involves a document set of 750.000 documents that need to be reviewed. Of these documents maybe 20% might be responsive. Having a chunk of your reviewing budget being consumed by the 80% that is irrelevant might not be your ideal situation.
Early Data Assessment (EDA) can significantly drive down the costs related to this work as you would be able to accelerate access to relevant documents and then to narrow down a document set before sending documents to your panel firms. Thus external legal costs could be reduced by sending law firms a smaller, but more complete and relevant set of docs, so your lawyers have fewer docs to review.
• How often do you choose to (not) pursue a matter based on the assessment of the raw data? How could you benefit from something like EDA?
• Do you see a way that EDA can help you book better margins on the use of legal tech tools on an ongoing basis?
Read part 3 of this blog series on how to safeguard sensitive information.